Entries from Eric Sloof

During my visit to Bergen (Norway), where I’m delivering a VMware vSphere Training course this week, I hooked-up with fellow vExpert Christian Mohn. Before heading into town :-) I’ve recorded a short interview with him.



Christian Mohn works as a Network Manager for a Norwegian shipping company where his responsibilities include developing and maintaining their IT infrastructure.  He’s also the thin line between agile and fragile as blogger over at vNinja.net. Together with Chris Dearden and Ed Czerwin, Christian is running the vSoup shows. Oh, I almost forgot to mention Christian's 500px.com photo website.

I/O Analyzer is a virtual appliance solution by VMware that provides a simple and standardized way of measuring storage performance in a VMware vSphere virtualized environments. I/O Analyzer automates the traditional storage performance analysis cycle and reduces the performance diagnosis time from days to hours.
 
Features include:

• Integrated framework for storage performance testing
• Readily deployable virtual appliance
• Easily configure and launch I/O tests on multiple hosts
• View integrated performance results at both guest and host levels
• Easily export performance data for off-site analysis

 

vPanorama provides an integrated simpler and smarter view of all the resources in a VMware environment. vPanorama gives VMware Administrators and Managers a simple, action-oriented way to grasp the complete VMware environment including storage and network resources. It shows you where in the network and storage bottlenecks are occurring, identifies which VMs are responsible for the bottlenecks, and provides a integrated way to address the bottleneck using vMotion, or Storage vMotion.



For up to 250 VMs it is free, get the Big Picture at http://www.vpanorama.com/

Learn how to plan for and take a snapshot that captures the virtual machine's memory. This video shows how to take a snapshot and discusses prerequisites and best practices for taking memory snapshots of vSphere virtual machines.

vCenter Chargeback Manager is an end-to-end cost reporting solution for virtual environments that are using VMware vSphere. vCenter Chargeback Manager provides functionality to define unit costs and calculate the overall costs based on the actual usage or reservation of computing resources. This Web-based application interacts with the vCenter Server Database to retrieve usage information, calculates the cost by using the defined chargeback formulas, and generates cost and usage reports.

vCenter Chargeback Manager runs on an Apache Tomcat server instance. Users interact with vCenter Chargeback Manager through a load balancer (Apache HTTP Server). vCenter Chargeback Manager connects to the vCenter Chargeback Manager database that stores application-specific information, such as the defined chargeback hierarchies, cost models, users, roles, and so on. The application interacts with the vCenter Server using VIM APIs and with the vCenter Server database through a data collector. The data collector communicates with the vCenter Server Database using JDBC.

Continue reading "VMware has released vCenter Chargeback Manager..." »

Join Arista and VMware technical leaders as they go in-depth into the new Virtual eXtensible LAN technology -VXLAN.  VXLAN delivers on the ability to execute Stateful Layer-3 vMotion's - the live migration of a workload to any server in the network, at any time, in seconds, regardless of the IP addressing topology of your infrastructure.  VXLAN overcomes the segmentation boundaries and broadcast domain constraints of 802.1q VLANs, replacing them with a more granular and scalable model for segmentation and scaling.  In this session you will learn about VXLAN, the framing format, encapsulation mechanism, how to prepare the network and infrastructure, and how to operate and troubleshoot this environment.

Please register and you will receive a confirmation email reserving your spot in this webinar! 

December 2, 2011 - 10:00am PDT

The ESX System Analyzer is a tool designed to help administrators plan a migration from ESX to ESXi. It analyzes the ESX hosts in your environment and, for each host, collects information on factors that pertain to the migration process:

• Hardware compatibility with ESXi
• VMs registered on the ESX host, as well as VMs located on the host’s local disk
• Modifications to the Service Console RPMs which have been added or removed or files which have been added  or users and cronjobs which have been added

This tool also provides summary information for the whole existing environment

• Version of VMware Tools and Virtual Hardware for all VMs
• Version of Filesystem for all datastores

By having this information, administrators can determine what tasks need to be done prior to the migration. Examples include:

• Relocate VMs from local datastores to shared datastores
• Replace cronjobs with equivalent remote scripts written with PowerCLI or vCLI
• Make note of what agent software has been added to the host and obtain the equivalent agentless version

Be one of the first one to try, rate and comment - ESX-system-analyzer

Update: Remon Lam over at VirtualVlouds.info has figuered out the username and password, he also has a link to the userguide.

Viktor van den Berg is ramping up. He has presented a great line-up of speakers who are going to deliver the most awesome sessions at the Dutch VMUG event. If you didn’t register yet, there's still a chance. Make sure you mark the 9th of December in your agenda. More information can be found here.

Here’s the list with the celebrities:

• Alan Renouf, Senior Technical Marketing, VMware
• Andre van der Werff, Senior Systems Engineer, VMware
• Bob de Kousemaeker, Principal Product Manager, RES Software
• Bouke Groenescheij, Freelance Consultant, jume.nl
• Cormac Hogan, Technical Marketing Manager for Storage, VMware
• Duncan Epping, Principal Architect, Technical Marketing, VMware
• Eric Sloof, Freelance Trainer/Consultant, Famous Blogger, NTPRO.NL
• Gabrie van Zanten, gabesvirtualworld.com / Consultant - OpenLine
• Henk Arts, Senior System Engineer, Veeam Software
• Jeroen van de Kamp, CTO, Login Consultants
• Luc Dekens, System Engineer, Eurocontrol Maastricht
• Marcel Steenman, Senior Technical Consultant, Platani
• Mattias Sundling, Virtualization Expert, Quest
• Michael Heffernan, Global Chief Technologist Virtualisatie, Hitachi Data Systems
• Raymon Epping, Technical Account Manager, Professional Services, VMware
• Ruben Spruijt, Technology Officer, PQR
• Stefan Willems, Senior Solution Architect, Platani
• Verron Martina, vSpecialist, EMC
• Viktor van den Berg, VMware Consultant, PQR, Dutch VMUG Leader

I’ve met Jeff last week in Oslo (Norway) where he was delivering a Cisco UCS training while I was teaching the VMware vSphere 5 Install, Configure and Manage course. During one of the dark Nordic evenings, we went out for dinner. We had some great hamburgers and I offered him a taste of my homemade sambal :-) The ice was broken and we had some pretty good laughs that evening.

Jeff works as a full-time Independent Instructor/Consultant that focuses on Cisco UCS and IP Telephony technologies as well as VMware virtualization solutions.  One of his biggest interests is the implementation of Unified Communications on the Cisco UCS solution using VMware’s vSphere datacenter suite.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/layer8man

He has started a weblog over at cloudinaround.com, in one of his most recent articles he introduces the first in a series of videos that will explore the Cisco UCS architecture and signal flow. In this first video, he starts by identifying the main components and their connectivity. In follow-on videos, he’ll dive deeper into how everything communicates.

As of today, the software-as-a-service solution opvizor for analyzing and rectifying configuration, performance and security errors in virtualized environments is available on the market in Version 1.5. The new version’s architecture has been optimized in particular for medium-sized and large virtualized infrastructures. This is coupled with improvements in performance, disguising, in reporting and with an enlarged set of rules. As was the case for its predecessor, opvizor 1.5 is available on www.opvizor.com as a commercial and a free version. Continue reading "Icomasoft has released opvizor 1.5 also..." »