Online Training - 15

David Davis over at Train Signal has released the second volume of the VMware vSphere Pro Series Training Course. This new course expands on the precedent set by the first volume, with a line-up of some great new vExpert instructors Including David Davis, Hal Rottenberg, Sean Clark, and Eric Siebert.

• VMware Advanced Features Up Close by Eric Siebert
• VMware Site Recovery Manager 4 by Sean Clark
• Intro to Third-Party Virtualization Tools by David Davis
• Veeam Monitor - David Davis
• Veeam Reporter 4.0 - David Davis
• Veeam Backup and Replication - David Davis
• VMware Data Recovery (VDR) - David Davis
• PowerCLI by Hal Rottenberg

http://www.trainsignal.com/VMware-vSphere-Pro-Series-Training-Vol-2-P98.aspx

I’ve just received the new DVDs and I think I’m going to start with watching Hal and his reporting with PowerCLI video.

In this video you will walk step-by-step through the process of generating useful reports of your virtual environment using PowerCLI. Also, you will take a detailed look at the various ways to get data out of vSphere and vCenter. Plus, you will work hands-on to generate several reports that will be useful in managing your ever-changing virtual landscape.

During my weekly VMware training sessions, I’m always getting a bit excited when we reach the module where the ESX and virtual machine memory is covered. I’m trying to explain how important it is; not to use the virtual machine memory limit setting and very often students believe me after checking out their own production environment for ballooning activity and 9 out of 10 times they find a few virtual machine which have a memory limit configured. The memory limit is the upper limit on memory the ESX host makes available to virtual machine. Host memory reclamation happens regardless of the current host free memory state. For example, even if host free memory is in the high state, memory reclamation is still mandatory when a virtual machine’s memory usage exceeds its specified memory limit. If this happens, the ESX server will employ ballooning and, if necessary, swapping to reclaim memory from the virtual machine until the virtual machines host memory usage falls back to its specified limit.

I’ve recorded a video which shows you the Proofpudding and collected some useful links about this topic.

Scott Herold: Memory Behavior when VM Limits are Set
VMware KB: Virtual machine boots very slowly when Memory Limit
Arnim van Lieshout: PowerCLI: Reset CPU and Memory Limits

NFS is a great storage solution within a VMware vSphere environment but when the connection to the NFS server is lost, you’re in big trouble. In most circumstances some virtual machines are still connected to the NFS Datastore and since it’s in use, you cannot delete and recreate it. I’ve tried this by using the vSphere Client and trough the command line but didn’t succeed. In the end there’s no other alternative than rebooting the ESX host, or is there… If you want to find out how to remount an NFS Datastore you better watch this online training.

http://www.screencast.com/users/esloof/folders/Online-Training

You also have the ability to embed or link to it at Vimeo.

It's really a rough unprepared video but in the end you'll get the picture :-)

This morning I had a nice email discussion with a fellow VCI who has attended my online VLAN training. His question had to do with the VLAN IDs that need to be configured at the physical Cisco switch. Do you only  need to configure the primary or do you also need to configure the secondary and isolated VLAN IDs?

Hi Eric, when you configure PVLAN, the Switch itself should configured with ONLY the PRIMARY VLAN not the whole range of Primary / secondary… doing so could be a security issue… Could you check at your  side that using 23-23 instead of 23-26 at timecode 31:07 in your movie, don't change the behaviour or the communications between VMs?

After applying 23-23 of both port 2 and 3 at the Cisco switch, virtual machines within both the communities cannot connect to the router and to each other. After  putting in 23-25, the virtual machines in community 2 (26) could not ping each other and in community 1 (25) can.

I knew I’ve seen it somewhere -> Community and Isolated PVLANs traffic travels tagged as the associated Secondary PVLAN. At the bottom of this KB article.

•Promiscuous PVLANs have the same VLAN ID both for Primary and Secondary VLAN.
•Community and Isolated PVLANs traffic travels tagged as the associated Secondary PVLAN.
•Traffic inside PVLANs is not encapsulated (no Secondary PVLAN encapsulated inside a Primary PVLAN Packet).
•Traffic between virtual machines on the same PVLAN but on different ESX hosts go through the Physical Switch. Therefore, the Physical Switch must be PVLAN aware and configured appropriately, to allow the secondary PVLANs to reach destination.
•Switches discover MAC addresses per VLAN. This can be a problem for PVLANs because each virtual machine appears to the physical switch to be in more than one VLAN, or at least, it appears that there is no reply to the request, because the reply travels back in a different VLAN. For this reason, it is a requirement that each physical switch, where ESX with PVLANs are connected, must be PVLAN aware.

During the delivery of VMware Training Courses, I’ve noticed students who are really  interested in how to configure the Cisco Switch in order to use  Private VLAN IDs. This session will show you how to configure dvPortGroup Settings and Private VLANs on a Distributed Virtual Switch and on a Physical Cisco Switch.

• This presentation will lead you trough configuring VLAN IDs at both the vSphere environment and on the physical Cisco switch.

• You’ll get a good understanding of trunking on a Cisco switch and dvPortGroup Settings.

• At the end you’re able to configure a Cisco switch using Cisco’s Network Assistant and understand the different dvPortGroup Settings.

The online training will take around 40 minutes, you can view it here: http://itunes.apple.com/nl/podcast/online-vmware-training/id415180540

You also have the ability to download the complete “Configure VMware vSphere Private VLANS” training, or embed and link to it on Vimeo.