Entries from Eric Sloof

Wednesday, June 12. 2013

New Training Course - VMware vCloud Automation Center: Install, Configure, Manage

This training course (three days of instructor-led classroom) focuses on installing, configuring, and managing VMware vCloud Automation Center. This course covers the configuration and use of vCloud Automation Center as a platform for self-service provisioning of virtual, cloud, and physical machines to create and manage on-demand multivendor cloud infrastructures.

Course Objectives

By the end of the course, you should be able to meet the following objectives:

Understand the vCloud Automation Center architecture and use case in multivendor cloud environments
Install and configure vCloud Automation Center 5.2
Manage vCloud Automation Center 5.2 entities on VMware and third-party hardware and cloud infrastructures
Configure and manage provisioning groups and blueprints
Configure and manage enterprise groups and reservations for compute resources on VMware, Microsoft, Citrix, and more
Use the Self-Service portal to request and manage machines according to vCloud Automation Center approval policies
Use the Report portal to monitor vCloud Automation Center configuration and managed resources
Understand and configure vCloud Automation Center workflows
Manage and monitor machines and resource reclamation

VMware vCloud Automation Center: Install, Configure, Manage [V5.2] - BETA

Tuesday, June 11. 2013

VMware vCenter Log Insight v1.0 Open Beta

VMware vCenter Log Insight is the new solution of VMware for log management and analytics. It delivers superior technology for automated log management through log analytics, aggregation, and search, and an easy to use user interface. Log Insight provides the operational intelligence needed to proactively enable service levels and operational efficiency in dynamic hybrid cloud environments.

VMware vCenter Log Insight addresses these challenges and enables improved quality of service, operational efficiency and continuous compliance.

Log Insight includes the following key capabilities:

Collects and analyzes all types of machine-generated log data, e.g. application logs, network traces, configuration files, messages, performance data, system state dumps, and more.
Enables administrators to connect it to everything in their environment, e.g. operating systems, applications, storage arrays, firewalls, network devices etc., providing a single location to collect, store, and analyze logs at scale.
Features an intuitive GUI-based interface that makes it easy to run simple interactive searches as well as deep analytical queries for quick, actionable insights.
Automatically chooses the best visualization for your data, saving you valuable time.
Adds structure to all types of unstructured log data, enabling administrators to troubleshoot quickly, without needing to know the data beforehand.
Delivers real-time monitoring, search, and analytics, coupled with a dashboard for stored queries, reports, and alerts, enabling correlation of events across multiple tiers of a hybrid cloud environment.
Comes with built-in knowledge and native support for vSphere.
Integrates with the VMware vCenter Operations Management platform to bring unstructured data (e.g. log files) together with structured data (e.g. metrics and KPIs), offering a significantly enhanced solution for end-to-end operations management.

Public Beta Program Opens to Foster Community Input

To encourage broad product feedback and testing from customers and partners, VMware vCenter Log Insight is now available for download via a public beta program. Participants can provide detailed product feedback, rank features and request new capabilities via the public beta program site at: http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/vcenter/vcenter-log-insight.

Sunday, June 9. 2013

vCenter Operations Manager - The GEO Dashboard Widget

In this video you will see how to group Resources by GEO location and activate the dashboard widget. Depending on your environment, you might want to group some or all of your resources according to their physical location. When resources are grouped according to their physical location, you can see the health of all of the resources in a particular place. To group resources by their physical location, you must activate the geographical location feature, create values for the GEO Location tag, and assign the resources that you want to track to GEO Location tag values.

Activate the Geographical Location Feature - To group resources by location, you must activate the geographical location feature in vCenter Operations Manager.
Create a GEO Location Tag Value - Before you can assign resources to a location, you must create that location as a value of the GEO Location tag and define its position on the map. Create tag values for each of your office locations.
Assign a Resource to a GEO Location Tag Value - You define a resource's location by assigning it to a value of the GEO Location tag.
View the Resource Map - You can use the world map on the Geographical tab on the Environment Overview page to see the health of the resources at some or all of your defined locations. The GEO widget shows a map similar to the map on the Geographical tab. You can add the GEO widget to any dashboard.

Wednesday, June 5. 2013

vCenter Operations and the Quest for the Missing Metrics has been accepted for VMworld 2013

We've received some great news today. Our session proposal "vCenter Operations and the Quest for the Missing Metrics" has been accepted for both VMworld US and Europe 2013.

This session will teach you how to customize vCenter Operations to provide you the information you really need for your business. We do this by giving you some real life examples from the field where we use Custom Dashboards, Super Metrics, Adapters and Alerts in order to give you the best possible view in to the well-being of your environment. You’ll also see a live demo and hear how a VMware customer identified nearly significant savings and has streamlined the capacity management process with vCenter Operations Management.

The session will be presented by Duco Jaspars and Eric Sloof.

vSphere Storage Appliance 5.1.x Brownfield Deployments

In the version 1.0 release of VMware vSphere Storage Appliance, a brand-new, unmodified installation of vSphere 5.x infrastructure, also known as a greenfield infrastructure, was required for deployment. This requirement was identified as a significant constraint to the usability of the solution.

The latest release of vSphere Storage Appliance, version 5.1.x, addresses this limitation in deployment options. vSphere Storage Appliance version 5.1.x can be deployed into a VMware vSphere 5.x infrastructure that is already in production, with configured virtual networks and operating virtual machines.

This type of vSphere Storage Appliance 5.1.x deployment is known as a brownfield deployment. This white paper will discuss the procedure and requirements for vSphere Storage Appliance 5.1.x deployments into existing vSphere infrastructures.

New Technical White Papers: vSphere Storage Appliance 5.1.x Brownfield Deployments

Tuesday, June 4. 2013

VMware Certification Exams 75% off During VMworld

All VMware Certification exams, including advanced professional certifications, will be 75% off the regular price, when taken on-site at VMworld San Francisco! This is a unique opportunity to validate your cloud and virtualization skills – at a significant discount. Space is limited, reserve your seat today!

VMware Certified Professional – Data Center Virtualization (VCP-DCV)
VMware Certified Professional – Cloud (VCP-Cloud)
VMware Infrastructure as a Service exam*
VMware Certified Professional – Desktop (VCP-DT)

VMware Certified Advanced Professional – Data Center Design (VCAP-DCD)*
VMware Certified Advanced Professional – Data Center Administration (VCAP-DCA)*
VMware Certified Advanced Professional – Cloud Infrastructure Design (VCAP-CID)*
VMware Certified Advanced Professional – Cloud Infrastructure Administration (VCAP-CIA)*
VMware Certified Advanced Professional – Desktop Design (VCAP-DTD)*

(*) Please note: you must have authorization from VMware before you can register for these exams.

Exam Center Hours: Sunday, August 25 - Thursday, August 29 / 10:00 - 18:00

Monday, June 3. 2013

Upcoming Training Course - VMware vCloud Director: Organization Administration

This course focuses on the organization administrator’s role in VMware vCloud Director in managing cloud resources. This course provides hands-on training for operators who are charged with administering their corporate resources in a public cloud or a private cloud.

This course assumes that a vCloud Director organization administrator is technically proficient in working at a department or customer level to support cloud operations. The vCloud Director organization administrator is responsible for assisting coworkers in the daily management and use of cloud resources provided to the organization from the vCloud Director cloud provider.

After completing this course, you should possess the knowledge and skills needed to manage a vCloud Director organization on a daily basis in the role of the vCloud Director organization administrator. By the end of this course, you should be able to meet the following objectives:

Manage organization virtual datacenter (vDC) networks
Create and manage VMware vSphere® vApp™ networks
Manage organization vDCs
Use organization allocation models
Manage organization quotas, limits, and policies
Manage organization configuration settings
Manage organization catalogs and media
Manage organization groups and users
Create and manage vApps and vApp templates
Create and manage vApp virtual machines
Use organization logs to manage tasks and events

Data Sheet: VMware vCloud Director - Organization Administration [V5.1] - BETA

Friday, May 31. 2013

vCloud Automation Center 5.2 - General Available

What’s New? - Expanded Infrastructure Support

Enhanced vCloud Director Integration. Machine owners can provision a vApp as a single entity, but manage the component VMs individually. The vApp blueprint specifies governance policies for the vApp as a whole (such as how many machines of each type it contains), while the vApp component blueprint specifies policies that control how the machine is provisioned, the resources it can consume, and what management functions users are allowed to perform. Users can connect to virtual machines in provisioned vApps using VMRC and reconfigure vApp component machines. Administrators can also bring existing vApps provisioned in vCloud Director under vCAC management by importing the vApps and assigning blueprints to them.

Support for vCloud Director Pay-As-You-Go Allocation Model. Enterprise administrators can create reservations on VDCs using Pay-As-You-Go, Reservation Pool, or Allocation Pool. Additionally, portions of an organization VDC can now be reserved for multiple provisioning groups rather than each VDC being restricted to a single provisioning group.
Support for vCloud Networking and Security (vCNS). Enterprise administrators can specify a vCNS Manager as part of a vSphere endpoint, enabling vCAC to discover network resources like VXLAN, load balancers, and security groups. They can also specify VXLAN as network paths on reservations. Enterprise administrators or provisioning group managers can specify a load balancer or security groups on blueprints to assign those pools and groups to virtual machines during provisioning.
Support for KVM (RHEV) Hypervisor. vCAC 5.2 introduces support for the KVM hypervisor through Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager 3.1.

Improved Resource Reclamation

Improved Workflow Customization. Enterprise administrators can specify how many days to wait before setting a lease on a machine and the new lease period when sending reclamation requests. Additionally, the provisioning group manager can receive email notifications and respond to reclamation requests in addition to the machine owner.Mware Documentation 2 Release 5.2vCloud Automation Center.
Performance Metrics for vSphere. Performance data collection gathers information about resource utilization including CPU, memory, disk, and network utilization to assist in identifying reclamation candidates.Additional Platform Support. vCAC 5.2 introduces support for reclamation of Amazon Web Service (EC2) machines.

VMware vCloud Automation Center - RAPID TIME TO CLOUD VALUE

vCAC 5.2 Release Notes

vCloud Director and vCAC just buddies or best friends

VMware vCloud Automation Center Documentation

Thursday, May 30. 2013

Deployment Guide - VMware View with FlexPod

Today, many CIOs are challenged to deliver a solution that efficiently and securely delivers Windows desktops and applications to all types of end-workers and devices in a way that meetscorporate objectives for cost, security, and compliance. In order to answer this challenge, VMware® View® with FlexPod™ provides the foundation for delivering efficient and scalable virtual desktop infrastructure using a pre-validated stack from industry-leading partners including VMware, Cisco, and NetApp.

The VMware View with Flexpod architecture reduces processes, thereby minimizing operational challenges such as configuration errors, and it lowers administrative costs. Using Flexpod to scale VMware View desktops on demand provides increased service levels and resource optimization. This solution enables enterprises to rapidly deploy a pre-tested and validated virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI). It provides proactive, predictive, and centralized

management that can be integrated with third-party tools.

This paper describes the Flexpod reference architecture for VMware View 5.1 that include the Cisco Unified Computing System (Cisco UCS) and the NetApp Fabric-Attached Storage (FAS) Systems. It also provides detailed guidance on how to architect, implement, and manage a large, scalable VMware View solution with FlexPod. The paper details the best integration points for each of the key enabling Cisco and NetApp technologies and how each of these technologies plays a critical and complementary role in providing an integrated solution for VMware View

deployments.

This paper is intended for IT decision makers, architects, administrators, and others who want to familiarize themselves with the components and capabilities of VMware View on FlexPod. This paper assumes that the reader has a general understanding of VMware View and the VMware vSphere platform, and the Flexpod, Cisco, and Netapp products described in this solution.

Deployment Guide - VMware View with FlexPod

Monday, May 27. 2013

vCAC 5.1 Configuration Notes for Loadbalancer.org

A few days ago I've posted an article about the Loadbalancer.org virtual appliance being VMware ready and I've received some nice feedback from people who already have implemented the appliance in their production environment.

Michael Patton who works as a VMware vCAC PSO (National Team) North America responded with:

"My reason for writing is recently - I took on Loadbalancer.org product as a means to LB with vCAC 5.1. I worked with product and created a configuration that may be of use to your readers. Since Loadbalancer.org can be configured in may different ways - please see attached as a configuration example. The intent was simply a layer 7 LB configuration for two front end Web Servers hosting VMware's vCAC 5.1 product line."

ConfigurationNotesforLabLoadbalancer.org.pdf

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