Entries from Eric Sloof

Thursday, June 27. 2013

Video - VMware vCenter Log Insight Overview

Organizations seeking a log analytics solution optimized for VMware environments can utilize VMware vCenter Log Insight, which features built-in knowledge and native support for VMware vSphere, including pre-built dashboards and reports based on best practices from VMware engineering and global support.

Integration between VMware vCenter Log Insight and VMware vCenter Operations further enables organizations to bring together and analyze both structured and unstructured data for end-to-end operations management. Directly from VMware vCenter Operations, administrators can launch VMware vCenter Log Insight in context for any object or alert to identify the root cause of an IT infrastructure issue.

VMware vCenter Log Insight also converts log data into KPIs that are fed directly to VMware vCenter Operations for administrators to view log details and alerts in a single dashboard.

Download VMware vCenter Log Insight

Wednesday, June 26. 2013

Cool Mac Tool - Skim PDF Viewer

Skim is a (free) viewer for Portable Document Format (PDF) files, intended for easy reading and studying PDF documents. You can search PDF files, bookmark them, add notes, highlight sections, and take "snapshot" for easy reference. Skim can also open PostScript (PS) files, converting them to PDF. In addition, with Skim you can fully concentrate on reading the PDF file in a power-full full screen mode, or give full screen presentations of your PDF file.

Download Skim PDF Viewer

Tuesday, June 25. 2013

Cool Mac Tool - ZeroBrane Studio

ZeroBrane Studio is a lightweight Lua IDE with code completion, syntax highlighting, remote debugger, code analyzer, live coding, and debugging support for several Lua engines. It is simple and instantly usable for beginners, yet feature-rich and extensible for experienced developers. Unlike Eclipse and IntelliJ, it has a small footprint and is completely customizable with Lua. Unlike TextMate and Sublime Text, it includes a remote debugger and a full IDE feature set.

ZeroBrane Studio also provides several unique features: live coding for immediate feedback, Markdown formatting in comments for providing instructions with minimal context switching, and integrated interactive materials for those learning Lua or getting familiar with programming.

Download ZeroBrane Studio

Cool Mac Tool - TextWrangler

TextWrangler is a super-powerful all-purpose (free) Mac text editor and UNIX server administrator's multitool. Oh, and like the best things in life? It's free. TextWrangler is a general-purpose text editor for light-duty composition, data-file editing (where the data files consist of plain [unstyled] text), and manipulation of text-oriented data. TextWrangler supports working with both plain-text and Unicode files (with the exception of files written using right-to-left writing systems, such as Hebrew or Arabic).

Download TextWrangler

Cool Mac Tool - Fugu SSH

Fugu is a (free) graphical frontend for the text-based Secure File Transfer Protocol (SFTP) client that ships with Mac OS X. SFTP is similar to FTP, but the entire session is encrypted, meaning nothing, including passwords, is sent in the clear. Fugu provides a friendly, intuitive interface for OpenSSH's SFTP client, featuring secure drag-and-drop file transfers, remote file editing and remote file preview.

Fugu allows you to take advantage of SFTP's strong encryption without having to sacrifice ease of use. Additionally, Fugu can make secure file transfers using Secure Copy (SCP), and can create SSH tunnels to facilitate secure interaction between machines.

Download Fugu SSH

Friday, June 21. 2013

VMware Academic Program (VMAP): Technical Journal - Summer 2013

Steve Muir - Director - VMware Academic Program: Happy first birthday to the VMware Technical Journal! We are very pleased to have seen such a positive reception to the first couple of issues of the journal, and hope you will find this one equally interesting and informative. We will publish the journal twice per year going forward, with a Spring edition that highlights ongoing R&D initiatives at VMware and the Fall edition providing a showcase for our interns and collaborators.

Topics

Memory Overcommitment in the ESX Server
Redefining ESXi IO Multipathing in the Flash Era
Methodology for Performance Analysis of VMware vSphere under Tier-1 Applications
vATM: VMware vSphere Adaptive Task Management
An Anomaly Event Correlation Engine: Identifying Root Causes, Bottlenecks, and Black Swans in IT Environments
Simplifying Virtualization Management with Graph Databases
Autonomous Resource Sharing for Multi-Threaded Workloads in Virtualized Servers

Download PDF : VMWARE TECHNICAL JOURNAL VOL. 2, NO. 1 – JUNE 2013

Monday, June 17. 2013

Now available as Rough Cut - VCP-Cloud Official Cert Guide

The Rough Cuts service from VMware Press gives you exclusive access to an evolving manuscript that you can read online or download as a PDF and print. A Rough Cuts book is not fully edited or completely formatted, but you'll get access to new versions as they are created.

VMware has offered the VMware Certified Professional (VCP) exam since the early 2000s but has recently expanded their offerings to include the VMware Certified Advanced Professional (VCAP) and VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) certifications.

Even more recently, VMware has increased the certification tracks to include End User Computing (EUC) - also known as “Desktop” - and Cloud certifications and has renamed the core virtualization track to Data Center Virtualization (DCV). This means that anyone with the legacy “VCP” certification is now considered VMware Certified Professional - Data Center Virtualization (VCP-DCV) holders.

What is common to each track is that there is a progressive certification path that takes the candidate from VCP to VCAP to VCDX. What’s involved with each step on the path?

The Official VCP-Cloud Cert Guide is a key component to studying for the certification on VMware vCloud Suite. With more than 200,000 VCPs currently in the marketplace, and VMware’s vCloud Director suite becoming the standard for private and hybrid cloud deployments, this guide will assist existing VCPs secure their VCP-Cloud certification, as well as assist new administrators interested in procuring the certification on vCloud Director.

Rough Cut - VCP5-Cloud Official Cert Guide: VMware Certified Professional - Cloud

Integration of Log Insight with the vCenter Operations Management platform

In this video you will see the integration of Log Insight with the vCenter Operations Management platform. VMware vCenter Operations Manager 5.7.1 introduces integration with vCenter Log Insight (GA available in Q3 2013) and the vCenter Web Cleint. Log Insight can be configured to send alerts to vCenter Operations Manager about vCenter Server objects. In the vSphere UI, vCenter Operations displays links to launch Log Insight in-context from the alerts details page and from the objects details page.

Integration of Log Insight with the vCenter Operations Management platform extends operational visibility and proactive management capabilities across infrastructure and applications in a dynamic, hybrid cloud environment. Integration also helps you maximize ROI and value by bringing unstructured data (such as syslog files) together with structured data (such as metrics and key performance indicators), offering a significantly enhanced solution for end-to-end operations management.

Thursday, June 13. 2013

New Technical White Paper - End Your Data Center Logging Chaos with VMware vCenter Log Insight

Although vCenter Log Insight can be used as a standalone log consolidation and analysis tool, it’s greatest strength (and biggest differentiator) is its tight integration with vCenter Server, vSphere, and vCenter Operations Manager. No other virtualization-management tool can give you such a complete view of your data center operations by correlating virtualization performance events and system log entries across the vSphere infrastructure.

Another of vCenter Log Insight’s great strengths is that it can also manage physical servers, storage, and network devices. vCenter Log Insight is extensible, because you can add third-party content packs (made up of numerous fields) or your own content packs.Both large enterprises and small and midsized businesses (SMBs) should use vCenter Log Insight to consolidate their log data to gain strong analytics and troubleshooting capabilities.

VMware vCenter Log Insight is useful for monitoring, troubleshooting and securing your data center, and it’s quick to set up and enjoyable to use. In addition, vCenter Log Insight offers unique integration with vCenter Operations Manager to give you a complete view of your virtual infrastructure.

End Your Data Center Logging Chaos with VMware vCenter Log Insight by David Davis

Wednesday, June 12. 2013

Upgrading to VMware vCenter Operations Manager 5.7.1

vCenter Operations Manager 5.7.1 is the latest release of VMware's integrated operations suite, converging performance, capacity, and configuration management. This new release introduces the following features and enhancements.

Performance Report Pack

This release introduces new performance report pack. By default, reports now include operations status report for line of business virtual machines, alert and performance trend, cluster utilization trend, average and peak virtual machine storage latency. With these reports you can get a consolidated operational status for a group of virtual machines and identify the clusters, datastores, or virtual machines have had performance problems. You can assess any impact to performance in terms of performance or health degradation, as well as determine which datastores had performance problems for the given time and identify the impacted virtual machines from a given datastore. For more information about the new performance reports, see the topic "Reporting Tools in vCenter Operations Manager" in the VMware vCenter Operations Manager Online Help.

Launch in Context

vCenter Operations Manager is enhanced to offer in-context application launch capability. Using this feature, you can configure a button or menu item to launch an external application using a URL in a specific context defined by the active UI element and selected object. For example, you can add an "Open in" drop-down menu that launches the vCenter Web user interface, navigating to the details of a selected virtual machine. In the same menu, there might be other items that launch into Hyperic or Log Insight for the same virtual machine.

vCenter Log Insight Integration

This release introduces integration with vCenter Log Insight (GA available in Q3 2013) and vCenter Operations Manager. Log Insight can be configured to send alerts to vCenter Operations Manager about vCenter Server objects. In the vSphere UI, vCenter Operations displays links to launch Log Insight in-context from the alerts details page and from the objects details page.

vSphere Dashboards in the Custom UI

The vSphere group in the Dashboards menu contains several default dashboards for managing virtual objects in a vSphere environment. These default dashboards are available to all members of the Administrators, Operators, and Users user groups. This release introduces the following default vSphere dashboards:

Troubleshooting Dashboard
VM Utilization Dashboard
VM Performance Dashboard
Host Utilization Dashboard
Cluster Utilization Dashboard
Datastore Performance Dashboard
Datastore Space Dashboard
Heatmaps Dashboard
Alerts Dashboard
Host Memory Dashboard

This video will show you some of the new features and how to upgrade to version 5.7.1. This procedure is applicable when updating to vCenter Operations Manager 5.7.1 vApp from the following product versions. vCenter Operations Manager 5.0, 5.0.1, 5.0.2, 5.0.3, 5.6, and 5.7.1, including any Hotfix versions.

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