Entries from Eric Sloof

This afternoon Eric Sloof and Mattias Sundling were interviewed by Jeremy van Doorn, the famous presenter of VMworldTV. In this interview we are discussing the highly popular “Mythbusters goes virtual” VMworld session. This session (VSP3067) will be repeated at Thursday 14:00 but the great news is that it also will be presented by Mattias and Eric at the Dutch VMUG which will take place at the 9th of December 2011.  

Get a sneak peak at what you can learn from one of the highest rated sessions at VMworld Europe. The Mythbusters go Virtual to tell you all about some common misconceptions and teach you to avoid them.

ESX includes a CIM Object Manager (CIMOM) that implements a set of server discovery and monitoring features. With the VMware CIM SMASH/Server Management API, clients that use industry-standard protocols can do the following:

•    Enumerate system resources
•    Monitor system health data

The plugin is general enough to support other CIM compliant services and is not limited only to ESX. The goal of this plugin was to expose ESX CIMOM in the vCenter Orchestrator.

Be one of the first one to try, rate and comment - http://labs.vmware.com/flings/cim-plugin

This morning, during the VMworld 2011 Europe VCI day, I’ve received the VMware Certified Instructor Certificate of Achievement from Chris Cottam – Director, Education Delivery EMEA. I’ve received this award in recognition of my outstanding contribution; I’ve trained the highest number of students. I also have delivered very wide range of VMware training courses, my focus is on the advanced vSphere training courses. Besides delivering courses, I was an active participant in the vSphere 5 beta community. During the official launch at the 12th of July I created several vSphere 5 videos and made the recordings available via YouTube and iTunes. I was awarded as vExpert 2011 at the first of July and have passed his VCP5 exam at the end of September. During the VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas, I was a speaker and presented a top 3 rated session which was repeated twice due to its popularity. The “Myhtbusters goes virtual” session was very well received at the VMworld 2011 Las Vegas. Because of that, it will also run at the VMworld 2011 Copenhagen.

The VMworld, hosted by VMware, is the leading virtualization and cloud infrastructure event of the year. It's specifically designed for IT professionals seeking to accelerate success in their enterprises as they preserve existing investments while aligning their specific requirements to enable the cloud.

This year’s VMworld is about to kick off at the Bella Center in Copenhagen, but next year it will be more south, far more south… Barcelona.

Mark your agenda’s for some tapas – 16...18 October 2012  October 9th to 11th Spain will get hot and virtualized!!!

The combination of View 5 and vSphere 5 deliver significant improvements in user experience and consolidation ratios, while at the same time delivering significant reductions in bandwidth consumption. This paper highlights how enhancements to View’s PCoIP lossless compression algorithm and support for client-side image caching in combination deliver up to 75% bandwidth reduction in both WAN and LAN conditions when compared with the previous release of View.

Further this paper illustrates how, across all network configurations, View 5 delivers improved user experience compared with other VDI solution, while consuming significantly less bandwidth and CPU resources than Microsoft RDP7 and comparable bandwidth to Citrix HDX.

Finally, while the View 5 PCoIP protocol dynamically adapts to changing network and CPU constraints, ensuring great experience out-of-the-box, this paper lists a number of environment variables and VDI best practices that ensure users can get the most out of their VDI environment.

VMware View 5 Performance and Best Practices

This white paper summarizes findings and recommends best practices to tune the different layers of an application’s environment for similar latency-sensitive workloads. By latency-sensitive, VMware means workloads that are looking at optimizing for a few microseconds to a few tens of microseconds end-to-end latencies; they don’t mean workloads in the hundreds of microseconds to tens of milliseconds end-to-end-latencies. In fact, many of the recommendations in this paper that can help with the microsecond level latency can actually end up hurting the performance of applications that are tolerant of higher latency.

- BIOS Settings
- NUMA
- Choice of Guest OS
- Physical NIC Settings
- Virtual NIC Settings
- VM Settings
- Polling Versus Interrupts
- Guest OS Tips and Tricks

VMware also has investigated the performance of two latency micro-benchmarks, one for Infiniband devices and another for networking devices, in VM DirectPath I/O (pass-through) mode, which bypasses most of the virtualization stack except the path for delivering interrupts from the underlying physical devices to the guest OS. Applying the recommendations reduced latency and therefore increased the score of these latency micro-benchmarks in a virtualized environment, bringing it closer to bare metal performance.

Best Practices for Performance Tuning of Latency-Sensitive Workloads in vSphere VMs

With VMware Data Recovery 2.0, VMware has extended the ability to quickly and simply protect and restore virtual machines. Fully integrated with VMware vCenter Server, VMware Data Recovery gives central management of backup and restore operations, and the inherent deduplication of data saves significant disk space and provides flexible options for storage. VMware Data Recovery 2.0 has introduced a number of improvements including performance enhancements, speed, and reliability improvements, as well as capabilities to enhance management with the ability to email reports and schedule maintenance windows.

Several fixes have been included that rectify issues found in VMware Data Recovery 1.2.1. Issues that have been resolved include:

• CIFS target handling and resilience
• Incremental RDM backup
• Backups failing with “not enough disk space” errors
• Backups failing with “disk full” error despite free space being available

Monday October 17th from 20:00-24:00 is your chance to meet up with peers before VMworld 2011 starts. This event is free for all attendees of VMworld and VMUG members. Please bring your VMworld badge or registration as a ticket. It’s not possible to pre-register for the event. VMUG DENMARK invites you to have free beer and soft drinks all night at one of the coolest places in Copenhagen.

See you all there - Cheers - http://www.vmugparty.com/

What happens during a front-end network outage? This video discusses and demonstrates what happens in a VMware vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) cluster during a front-end network outage.

What happens during a back-end network outage? This video discusses and demonstrates what happens in a VMware vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) cluster during a back-end network outage. 

This white paper describes a VMware best practices approach businesses can use to build View data protection solutions for the datacenter. The paper provides a reference architecture that can be used to develop VMware View backup and recovery solutions. It also describes backup and restore scenarios for View storage components and procedures for implementing these scenarios. Note that this paper does not address disaster recovery procedures for the View environment.

In particular, a well-planned View backup strategy improves business infrastructure availability. Implementing a stateless desktop architecture removes the need to backup virtual desktop machines, thus removing virtual Infrastructure complexity, which simplifies manageability and can reduce support cost. For highly critical systems, VMware also recommends implementing high availability architecture for virtual desktops.

Deployment and technical Considetation Guide - VMware View Backup Best Practices