The VMware vCloud Automation Solutions lab will accelerate the journey to a lights-out, fully automated, and efficient Software-Defined Datacenter. You can explore vCAC, Orchestrator, PowerCLI and AutoDeploy working together to solve real-world problems.
VMware products used: vSphere, vCloud Director (vCD), vCloud Automation Center (vCAC), vCNS, vCenter Server, vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) and PowerCLI.
A Tech Preview of the exciting new VMware NSX for vSphere product announced at VMworld. Learn how VMware NSX virtualizes your network and simplifies your datacenter. This lab is currently based on a beta version of code and you may encounter some user interface issues during the lab exercises.
The lab will be improved with newer code as the product moves closer to release. For now, brave the rapids, jump in with both feet and have a go at at VMware NSX, the premier solution for Network Virtualization.
In this VMworld TV video you will see an exclusive demo by CloudPhysics CTO Irfan Ahmad. CloudPhysics is uniquely positioned to solve operations management problems because of the
collective intelligence it derives from analyzing the world's IT operations data, combined with its
unique, patent-pending data center smart modeling and simulation techniques.
Customers use
CloudPhysics to identify and troubleshoot hundreds of operational issues by accessing focused
operational analytics -- referred to as "Cards" -- available on the CloudPhysics SaaS platform.
Example capabilities include:
Health Checks - CloudPhysics acts as an early warning health service for the IT
operator to identify operational hazards before they emerge by continuously checking
and matching a user's environment against a live database of field issues, including
firmware bugs, hardware incompatibilities and other potential problems. CloudPhysics
builds the collective intelligence for health checks through its Knowledge Base Advisor,
continuously gathering best practices from vendors and field knowledge from the
CloudPhysics community of sys admins.
Reporting - Admins gain insights into their VMware environments through interactive
queries using CloudPhysics' Card Builder, which requires no scripting or knowledge of
schemas. Users can pull pre-built reports (Cards) shared by community members or build
unique ones and share with community members and colleagues.
Analysis - CloudPhysics gives users big data-driven analytics for storage, compute and
other systems to identify radical efficiency and safety improvements for VMware.
Customers lower cost and risk by using results based on the CloudPhysics smart
modeling techniques.
Planning - CloudPhysics customers can simulate planned purchases or configuration
changes before rolling out in production. For example, CloudPhysics predicts the latency
benefit of I/O caching and determines optimal cache sizes to balance cost and
performance. Customers run this analysis before making storage hardware purchases
(like SSD devices) to avoid wasteful procurement while dramatically improving the
performance of business-critical applications. In the case of mission-critical configuration
changes common to HA applications, CloudPhysics analyzes HA configuration scenarios
before customers commit them into production. Customers optimize resource settings
while ensuring critical VMs are protected against server failures.
In this VMworld TV video you can see some amazing product demos presented by Liquidware's CTO, Jason Mattox.
ProfileUnity, which is emerging as the βgo-toβ persona management solution for VMware Horizon View environments when more robust functionality is required over the basic features of VMware Persona Manager. The FlexApp feature extends ProfileUnity to provide both user-installed and department-installed applications on demand, thus reducing the number of desktop images required.
FlexDisk provisions flexible user VMware VMDKs on a VMFS to eliminate application and data streaming over the network. A single FlexDisk with an application or data can be shared among many users enabling an organization to reduce application and data storage space requirements by roughly 100:1.
Flex-IO leverages ESXi host RAM to accelerate common IO across your virtual desktops which significantly increases the number of available IOPS to 25,000 or more per ESXi host. Flex-IO also reduces your storage footprint by up to 50% with disk compression. The combination of RAM to accelerate IOPS along with disk compression is what makes Flex-IO able to greatly simplify non-persistent VDI environments and removes the need for costly high-speed storage arrays and expensive maintenance.
In this VMworld TVinterview, VCDX Josh Odgers explains the Nutanix system reliability. The Nutanix Virtual Computing Platform is designed and engineered from the ground-up to
provide best-in-class reliability, and to efficiently cope with possible hardware and software
failures. The distributed software architecture runs a virtual storage controller (Controller
VM or CVM) on each node forming a distributed system.
All nodes actively work together to
aggregate individual direct-attached storage resources into a single global namespace that
can be leveraged by all hosts. All storage resources are managed by the Nutanix Distributed
Filesystem (NDFS) to ensure that data and system integrity is preserved in the event of
node, disk or software failure.
Data Protection
NDFS uses a distributed Oplog (short for operations log, and analogous to a fault-tolerant
journal on a local filesystem) as a staging area to absorb incoming writes onto a fast,
low-latency SSD tier. The data is then coalesced and later written (i.e., drained) to back-end
storage resources (Extent Store) asynchronously.
The Extent Store is made up of extents,
which are variable-sized contiguous regions of a vDisk (i.e., an NDFS file).
NDFS implements a fully distributed design that prevents Oplog data loss in the event of a
node failure. Before any write is acknowledged to the host, it is synchronously replicated to
an Oplog on another adjacent node. All nodes participate in replication. Only after the data
β and its associated metadata β is replicated, will the host receive an acknowledgment of a
successful write. This ensures that data exists in at least two independent locations within
the cluster and is fault tolerant.
An exclusive VMworld TV interview with Jim Silvera, Expert on vCenter Operations and how adapters collect and process data. A key feature of vCenter Operations Manager Enterprise is its ability to consume data from across the enterprise. vCenter Operations Manager Enterprise uses adapters to collect data from a variety of data sources, including specific third-party products.
Adapters work with the vCenter Operations Manager Enterprise Collector to collect and process data. The Collector acts as a gateway between vCenter Operations Manager Enterprise and its adapters. The adapters connect to and collect data from data sources, transform the data into a format that vCenter Operations Manager Enterprise can consume, and pass the data to the Collector for final processing.
Depending on the data source and the adapter implementation, an adapter might collect data by making API calls, using a command-line interface, or sending database queries. Some adapters collect data for each resource independently and other adapters extract data for all resources based on a specified time range.
vCenter Operations Manager Enterprise uses embedded adapters and external adapters. Embedded adapters are the most common type of adapter implementation.