Eric Sloof - Entries from November 2012

Wednesday, November 14. 2012

Getting Started with vSphere Web Client Programming - Setting up your development environment

This video is the first in a 3-part video series entitled "Getting Started with vSphere Web Client Programming" which will provide some insights as well as some deep-dive training and step-by-step demonstrations and examples of how you can setup a platform for developing your own solutions for the vSphere Web Client.

The three videos will cover the following respectively:

Setting up the development environment
Fundamentals of creating User Interface extensions
Fundamentals of creating Data View User Interface extensions

This video shows developers how to set up a platform for developing vSphere Web Client (VWC) solutions. It does this by:

Listing the vSphere environment necessary for developing VWC solutions
Listing the tool-chain required for developing VWC solutions
Showing a screencast of the download, installation, and configuration of the tool-chain
Showing a screencast of importing the VWC SDK (Software Development Kit) sample code into an STS (SpringSource Tool Suite) project

After watching, and following along with, this video, learners should be able to create their own development environment on a Microsoft Windows platform and import sample projects into their STS workspace

Note: As these three videos are aimed at providing a full class-room like training experience of the subject matter, the videos are actually quite long in duration with each video ranging between 45 minutes to 1 hour. VMware is sure that these videos will be of interest to anyone looking to get an insight into programming for the vSphere Web Client. Note: For best viewing results, ensure that the 720p quality setting is selected and view in full screen mode.

Source: https://blogs.vmware.com/kb by Graham Daly - Graham Daly is a Multimedia Specialist within the Global Support Services (GSS) Knowledge Management group at VMware. He is responsible for managing, maintaining and producing video tutorials for the VMware KBTV YouTube channel. Graham has been at VMware since 2006.

Tuesday, November 13. 2012

VMworld 2012 Europe Demo - VXLAN and the vDistributed Switch

Cloud computing services have experienced rapid growth over the past few years because they can keep costs down by allowing multiple tenants to share system resources. One requirement of making this multiple tenancy possible is to provide each tenant with network isolation. Segmenting the traffic using VLAN is a typical solution to this problem. However, service providers also need to keep up with customer demand by being able to move workloads to those servers that have spare resources.

To do so, network traffic needs to be encapsulated so that the workload is not tied to the underlying hardware. This can be a problem because the networking architecture ties the workloads to the underlying hardware, which restricts the movements of these workloads and limits where these workloads can be placed. In addition, segmenting the physical LAN using VLANs does not scale beyond a certain limit.

Virtual extensible LAN (VXLAN) is a network encapsulation mechanism that enables virtual machines to be deployed on any physical host, regardless of the host’s network configuration. It solves the problems of mobility and scalability in two ways:

It uses MAC in UDP encapsulation, which allows the virtual machine to communicate using an overlay network that spans across multiple physical networks. It decouples the virtual machine from the underlying network thereby allowing the virtual machine to move across the network without reconfiguring the network.
VXLAN uses a 24-bit identifier, which means that a single network can support up to 16 million LAN segments. This number is much higher than the 4,094 limit imposed by the IEEE 802.1Q VLAN specification.

Since VXLAN is an additional encapsulation mechanism introduced at the hypervisor layer, there are certain performance implications. This paper demonstrates that the performance of VXLAN on vSphere 5.1 is very close to a configuration without VXLAN, and vSphere 5.1 with VXLAN configured can meet the demands of today’s network-intensive applications.

VMware has used industry-standard benchmarks to conduct our experiments that demonstrate:

A virtual machine configured with VXLAN achieved similar networking performance to a virtual machine without VXLAN configured, both in terms of throughput and CPU cost.
vSphere 5.1 scales well as we add more virtual machines on the VXLAN network.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/VMware-vSphere-VXLAN-Perf.pdf

Monday, November 12. 2012

Demo of the New Features of vSphere 5.1 at VMworld Europe

VMware vSphere 5.1 continues to enhance the performance features and capabilities of the vSphere platform, making it the most robust and highest-performing cloud platform. vSphere 5.1 supports even larger virtual machines and physical hosts to accommodate even the most demanding of workloads. It also introduces several new features that reduce latency and increase throughput for network, storage and compute.

The following are some of the performance highlights in vSphere 5.1:

VMware vCenter Server

• VMware vSphere Web Client

• VMware vCenter™ Single Sign-On server scalability

• vCenter Server database and statistics collection enhancements

Core platform

• 64-way vCPU scalability

• 256 pCPU support

• New physical processor enablement

• Memory overhead reduction

• Virtualized CPU performance counters

• Latency setting

Storage

• VMware vSphere Storage I/O Control enhancements

• VMware vSphere Storage DRS enhancements

• 16GB Fibre Channel support

• Hardware iSCSI jumbo frames support

Network

• Single-root I/O virtualization (SR-IOV)

• VMware vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS) scalability improvements

VMware vSphere vMotion

• vMotion enhancements

• VMware vSphere Storage vMotion enhancements

Platform features for VMware vCloud Director and VMware View

• 3D graphics

• VMware vSphere APIs – Array Integration (VAAI) snapshots
• VXLAN

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/Whats-New-VMware-vSphere-51-Performance-Technical-Whitepaper.pdf

Wednesday, November 7. 2012

VMware Horizon Mobile 1.2 - Available for download

VMware Horizon Mobile enables enterprises to securely provision and manage corporate mobile workspaces on Android smartphones in isolation from employees' personal environments. This dual-persona solution makes corporate data more secure and enables enterprises to take advantage of employee-owned mobile devices.

Using Horizon Mobile features, you can enhance productivity by creating purpose-built, preconfigured native mobile workspaces based on each employee's responsibilities. Administrators can easily keep track of and manage corporate assets and applications on mobile devices through a Web-based portal. Security is seamlessly integrated with existing infrastructure to meet regulatory and compliance needs.

https://www.vmware.com/support/horizon_mobile/doc/horizon-mobile-12-release-notes.html

Tuesday, November 6. 2012

Technical White Paper - VMFS File Locking and Its Impact in VMware View 5.1

View versions prior to 5.1 had a limitation of supporting a maximum of eight hosts in an ESX cluster when VMware vStorage Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) storage was used. This was a barrier in a large-scale deployment of virtual desktops. View 5.1 breaks this scalability limitation by supporting a maximum of 32 hosts in an ESX cluster provided NFS storage is used for linked clone replica creation. Some common questions from

customers include:

What are the technical reasons for the eight-host limit?
Why is View affected by this limit while other VMware products are not?
Are there workarounds to overcome this limit?
How does View 5.1 overcome this limit?

This paper throws some light on these topics and tries to answer similar questions, in addition to presenting a few use cases using View with a cluster having more than eight hosts.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/vmware-view-vmfs-file-locking.pdf

Monday, November 5. 2012

Dutch VMUG Event 2012 - The Next Step

Het VMUG Event 7 december 2012 heeft als titel 'The Next Step' gekregen. Tijdens VMworld 2012 heeft VMware de vCloud Suite geïntroduceerd wat een belangrijke stap is in 'The journey to the cloud'. Daarnaast staan er een aantal veranderingen op stapel binnen VMUG Nederland, die VMUG als een belangrijke stap ziet in de toekomst. Over deze veranderingen willen we je graag tijdens het VMUG Event 2012 verder inlichten.

Agenda

De afgelopen weken is er invulling gegeven aan de agenda van het VMUG Event. De oproep onder de VMUG leden voor de Call for Papers heeft weer zeer interessante sessies opgeleverd, het was weer lastig kiezen. Uiteindelijk zijn we er in geslaagd een gevarieerd programma neer te zetten met 16 sessies.

Welke sessies en sprekers kun je zoal verwachten tijdens de 2012 editie van het VMUG Event?

What's New in vSphere 5.1 door Rob Groenhuis (VMware)
Distributed Storage: Een blik in de toekomst door Erik Zandboer (VMUG/vmdamentals.com)
Mythbusters goes virtual door Eric Sloof (VMUG/NTpro.NL) en Mattias Sundling (VMUG/Dell-Quest)
vSphere Hoe is uw Disaster Discovery geregeld? door Viktor van den Berg (VMUG/PQR)
vCloud Networking in de praktijk door Gabrie van Zanten (VMUG/gabesvirtualworld.com/OpenLine)
Network Virtualization, VXLAN & STT door Kamau Wanghuhu (VMware)
An insiders guide to virtualisation: Project Virt door Ruben Spruijt (PQR) en Jeroen v.d. Kamp (Login)
vCenter Operations door André van der Werff (VMware) en Alain Geenrits (VMware)
Performance en capaciteit rapporteren met Power CLI door Luc Dekens (VMUG/Eurocontrol)

NIEUW dit jaar is de groepsdiscussie. Onder leiding van Jan Willem Lammers (VMware) worden de deelnemers in de groep aangezet tot het voeren van een discussie in het geval van Oracle over de onduidelijkheid rond Support, Licensering, Certificering en Performance. Daarbij is het de bedoeling dat de deelnemers hun mening geven over het onderwerp en op elkaar reageren (interactie). Met de informatie uit deze sessie kunt u kwantificeren wat het voor de eigen organisatie kan opleveren en hoe de mogelijke risico's beperkt worden.

Niet te vergeten 'Dé workshops' Tijdens de Dutch VMUG Event kun je aan vier workshops deelnemen, verzorgd door Cisco, EMC, XTG en Veeam. De inhoud van de workshops vind je hier:

1. Workshop: Virtual Test Drive - Veeam

2. Workshop: vSphere Replication - XTG

3. Workshop: Cisco UCS Hands on – Cisco (Walk-in)

4. Workshop: Hands on Labs – EMC (Walk-in)

Genoeg redenen om het belangrijkste VMware User Group Event 2012 niet te missen! Ben je erbij? Klik hier voor de inschrijving zodat je er ook op 7 december bij kan zijn! Zorg wel dat je ingelogd met je VMUG account, anders kun je niet inschrijven! Geen VMUG account? Geen nood, vraag 'm hier gratis aan.

Tot 7 december op het VMUG Event 2012!

Sunday, November 4. 2012

Featured Blogger - Viktor van den Berg

From the birth of virtualization in The Netherlands, I've always been good friends with Viktor. We both worked as VMware Certified Instructors and Viktor has been the VMUG leader in The Netherlands for several years. He has stepped back as a VMUG leader at the beginning of this year when he switched jobs. Fortunately he didn't step back from the VMware community.

Viktor has started his own cloud computing & virtualization blog at:

www.viktorious.nl

Currently Viktor works as an infrastructure consultant at PQR. In this role he is involved in various cloud & virtualization related projects. With his blog he wants share his experiences in the field, besides that he will also be reporting about VMworld, VMUG meetings and everything that's happening in the blogosphere! Viktor is also still involved in Dutch VMUG TV. You will find these interviews at his blog and also at the Dutch VMUG website.

The blog is already successful and contains lots of valuable information. Be sure to visit Viktor's blog and follow him on twitter (@viktoriousss).

Thursday, November 1. 2012

Nexus 1000V Free/Essential and Advanced Editions now available for download

Nexus 1000V Free/Essential and Advanced Editions Now Shipping - The Nexus 1000V Essential Edition are available for free, plus a nominal annual support fee, in a move that Cisco believes will encourage customers and their partners to proliferate what has already become the most popular virtual switch in the industry with over 6,000 customers to date.

The Nexus 1000V Essential Edition provides all the rich Layer-2 networking features to connect virtual applications to the network and integrate into VMware environments, including: VXLAN capability, Cisco vPath service insertion, integration with vCloud Director, and a plug-in for management and monitoring in VMware’s vCenter Server. This free version will enable rapid, low-risk adoption of Cisco’s virtual network technology environments.

The Cisco Nexus 1000V Essential Edition and the Advanced Edition (with Cisco Virtual Security Gateway) have the following features:

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