White Papers - Entries from December 2012

Monday, December 31. 2012

Paul Grevink has released the VCAP5-DCA Study Guide

The content of the (349 pages) VCAP5-DCA Study Guide was first published as a series of posts on Paul's blog “Adventures in a Virtual World”, these posts were written in preparation for his VCAP5-DCA exam and are based on the official VMware Blueprint. The posts had to meet the following goals:

Based on the official Blueprint, follow the objectives as close as possible.
Refer to the official VMware documentation as much as possible. For that reason, every Objective starts with one or more references to the VMware documentation.
In case the official documentation is not available or not complete, provide an alternative.
Write down the essence of every objective (the Summary part).
If necessary, provide additional explanation, instructions, examples and references to other posts. All this without providing too much information.

VCAP5-DCA Study Guide is now available

Thursday, December 27. 2012

VMware Technical Journal - Winter 2012

The most recent winter edition of VMware's Technical Journal contains a lot of great topics. The foreword is written by VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger:

It’s my pleasure to introduce the second volume of the VMware Technical Journal. As VMware CEO and throughout my career I have emphasized the importance of engagement between industry and academia as an integral part of the “golden triangle” of innovation—organic innovation within dynamic companies alongside innovative research developments with universities and the passion of start-up environments. This volume of the Journal highlights how VMware taps into this approach, with many voices coming together to demonstrate the relationship between our academic research collaboration, internship programs and organic R&D efforts.

VMLab: Infrastructure to Support Desktop Virtualization Experiments for Research and Education
vQuery: A Platform for Connecting Configuration and Performance
Elastic Resource Allocation in Datacenters: Gremlins in the Management Plane
Toward a Paravirtual vRDMA Device for VMware ESXi Guests
Intrusion Detection Using VProbes
Design and Implementation of a Cloud Tenant UI
FrobOS is turning 10: What can you learn from a 10 year old?
Storage DRS: Automated Management of Storage Devices In a Virtualized Datacenter
A Social Media Approach to Virtualization Management
VMware View Planner: Measuring True Virtual Desktop Experience at Scale
vSOM: A Framework for Virtual Machine-centric Analysis of End-to-End Storage IO Operations

You can get a copy here - VMware Technical Journal - Winter 2012

Sunday, December 23. 2012

Technical Paper - Replacing Default vCenter 5.1 and ESXi Certificates

vSphere encrypts session information using standard digital certificates. Using the default certificates that vSphere creates might not comply with the security policy of your organization. If you require a certificate from a trusted certificate authority, you can replace the default certificate.

Certificate checking is enabled by default and SSL certificates are used to encrypt network traffic. However, ESXi and vCenter Server use automatically generated certificates that are created as part of the installation process and stored on the server system. These certificates are unique and make it possible to begin using the server, but they are not verifiable and are not signed by a trusted, well-known certificate authority (CA).

These default certificates are vulnerable to possible man-in-the-middle attacks. To receive the full benefit of certificate checking, especially if you intend to use encrypted remote connections externally, install new certificates that are signed by a valid internal certificate authority or public key infrastructure (PKI) service. Alternatively, purchase a certificate from a trusted commercial security authority. For information about encryption and securing your vSphere environment, see the vSphere Security documentation.

Replacing Default vCenter 5.1 and ESXi Certificates

Wednesday, December 19. 2012

Technical White Paper - Storage Best Practices for VMware View

VMware View is an enterprise-class virtual desktop manager that securely connects authorized users to centralized virtual desktops. It allows you to consolidate virtual desktops on datacenter servers and manage operating systems, applications and data independently for greater business agility while providing a flexible high-performance desktop experience for end users, over any network. Storage is the foundation of any VMware View implementation.

This document is intended for architects and systems administrators who are considering an implementation of View. It outlines the steps you should take to characterize your environment, from determining the type of users in your environment to choosing storage protocols and storage technology.

The paper covers the following topics:

Windows Disk I/O Workloads
Base Image Considerations
Storage Protocol Choices
Storage Technology Options
Storage Array Decisions
Increasing Storage Performance

Wednesday, December 12. 2012

Controlling Virtual Machine Sprawl - How to Better Utilize Virtual Infrastructure

Virtualization not only improves hardware efficiency via server consolidation, itdramatically reduces the time required to bring a new server online from weeks or months to hours or minutes. This ability to bring machines online quickly provides companies with improved business agility. As with most improvements new issues can be created, and if not addressed, can reduce a virtual infrastructure’s overall efficiency over time.

Virtual machine sprawl is one of the biggest concerns facing many companies using desktop or server virtualization. The ability to quickly create virtual machines without the disciplines and controls of the physical world results in machines being provisioned unnecessarily without proper justification and approval, over-provisioned (too much CPU, memory, or disk), or consuming resources well after they no longer are required.

To address this concern, a number of reporting products have been created to help track and identify virtual machine sprawl. The problem with report-only products is they provide only a partial solution. They only help identify the problem and track it whether it is getting better or worse. They do nothing to prevent the problem or correct it once it has occurred. This white paper looks at how a cloud automation platform can help decrease virtual machine sprawl by automating the process of reducing, reusing, and recycling compute resources in a shared physical infrastructure.

What’s New in VMware vCloud Automation Center 5.1

VMware vCloud Automation Center (formerly DynamicOps Cloud Automation Center) enables you to rapidly deploy and provision business-relevant cloud services across private and public clouds, physical infrastructure, hypervisors and public cloud providers. Acting as a service governor, it provides a cross-cloud “storefront” for infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) deployments. It empowers organizations to enforce business and IT policies throughout the service life cycle, helping them to transform virtualized environments into software-defined cloud datacenters.

Key features of vCloud Automation Center 5.1 help accelerate the delivery of business-relevant cloud services:

Personalized self-service – Embraces the consumerization of IT by empowering users to request and manage their compute resources within established operational policies.
Unified cloud management – Seamlessly spans multivendor private and public cloud technologies.
User-centric, business-aware governance – Allows policy granularity that enables IT to deliver business-relevant cloud services to meet the diverse needs of the groups IT supports.
Intelligent resource management – Helps ensure higher utilization through placement, prevention and reclamation of resources across virtual and physical servers.
Extensible by design – Offers a full spectrum of extensibility options that empower IT personnel to enable, adapt and extend their cloud to work within their existing IT infrastructure and processes.

(Page 1 of 2, totaling 7 entries)

Monday, December 31. 2012

Thursday, December 27. 2012

Sunday, December 23. 2012

Wednesday, December 19. 2012

Wednesday, December 12. 2012

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