Eric Sloof

This year I won’t send any Christmas and happy new year cards. Instead of sending those cards I will support the Net4kids foundation. As an ambassador for Net4kids I’m proud to see that the money this foundation receives is well spent on important projects . Net4kids is the internet market place for child aid projects. With Net4kids you choose for concrete child aid rather than anonymous donations. With regular updates they tell you exactly what difference you make through your contribution.  Whether as an individual, a company or a community, whether you are looking for one-off or structural support, with Net4kids you choose what you give and to whom. Thanks to the introduction of ICT lessons, increasing numbers of Ghana’s children are being prepared for the future. These lessons and access to a library not only provide them with new opportunities on the job market, they also gain better insight into the world around them.

Dutch: Vrolijk Kerstfeest en een Gelukkig Nieuwjaar! or Zalig Kerstfeest
English: Merry Christmas
German: Fröhliche Weihnachten
French: Joyeux Noel
Flemish: Zalig Kerstfeest en Gelukkig nieuw jaar
Greek: Kala Christouyenna!
Russian: Pozdrevlyayu s prazdnikom Rozhdestva is Novim Godom
Spanish: Feliz Navidad
Thai: Sawadee Pee Mai or souksan wan Christmas
Turkish: Noeliniz Ve Yeni Yiliniz Kutlu Olsun
Farsi: Cristmas-e-shoma mobarak bashad

This year’s Dutch VMUG event 2010 is massive! The number of attendees is over 750 and there are loads of great sessions and workshops. Right before lunch, I had the honour to present my session which deals with virtual machine advanced troubleshooting in a vSphere environment. When you are interested in  the metrics you can find in esxtop and prepared to go beyond the point where you’re just looking at CPU ready times then this slide deck will give you a better insight. You can also get a grip on things like memory limits and reservation, storage bottlenecks and finding the reason for dropped network packets.

This presentation has cost me a lot of time to prepare but it was a joy to build it. I’ve been working on it for two months. Besides delivering training on a daily basis, I’ve spent every free minute on doing research, gathering screenshots and creating awesome graphics. Two valued virtualization colleagues have reviewed the presentation so I want to thank Rawlinson Rivera and Harold Schoofs for their great feedback. vSphere  Advanced Troubleshooting has been presented during my VMware training courses for five times, so from this place many thanks to all my students for their great feedback in the past weeks. I’ve uploaded the presentation to SlideShare but you can also get a copy here: AdvancedTroubleshooting.pdf - 50 slides of awesomeness from start to end, I hope you enjoy it.

In the last part of the VMworld 2010 keynote VMware’s CEO Paul Maritz was referring to a new kid on the block called Integrien. It’s a relatively small company but they got some awesome products. Integrien recently launched a new product called AliveVM. I’ve managed to capture some screenshots and a brief description but it isn’t available for download anymore. The website says: VMware has acquired Integrien. The purchasing of this product is temporarily suspended, until further notice.

AliveVM is a revolution in real-time performance management for VMware administrators, built on the industry leading, enterprise-class Integrien Alive platform. AliveVM fills the existing gap for automated performance management for VMware administrators with sophisticated learning-based analytics and an elegant and easy-to-use web-based interface. With AliveVM, VM Administrators are no longer forced to rely on classic monitoring tools and techniques that provide limited insight into the performance of their virtual infrastructure. With the introduction of AliveVM, they are provided with detailed behavioral analysis of the entire virtual environment. AliveVM also provides a real-time summary of performance Health, Workload usage, and Capacity forecasts for each and every virtual element (e.g., Virtual Machines, ESX Servers, Clusters, Storage LUNs and Network elements). Whether your virtual environment spans 50 Virtual Machines or 50,000, AliveVM will vastly simplify your performance management and virtual infrastructure optimization.


At this moment the product is being re-branded and the interface is undergoing some design changes as well, VMware will probably re-launch AliveVM in the first quarter of 2011.

My VMworld started with the VMware Certified Instructor day.  It’s a great day for meeting up with fellow instructors and learn about newly released products firsthand.  There were some Q/A sessions about VMware View 4.5, the Cloud Service Director and VCDX with subject matter experts like Tommy Walker,  Michael Haines, Duncan Epping, John Arrasjid and Pang Chen.

The best VCI Awards were handed out by Andy Cary, Undeleeb Din and Chris Cottam . Brian Rice gave us an insight into the Education Road Map and the Certification Road Map. The VCI Program session was presented by David Day. Although a lot of information is still under NDA, I was able to shoot some video footage.

Although VMware’s website still has a landing page for VMware vCenter ConfigControl, the rumour goes that this product will be rebranded into vCenter Change Insight. This soon to be released new product is able to track, analyze, assess and take corrective actions to maintain configuration integrity.  It’s also able to setup policies to invoke workflows on a selected set of entities, upon a schedule or an event.

The preliminary feature list looks very promising

• Auto-documents environment, all entities, relationships, dependencies
• Tracks and alerts on configuration and relationship changes real time
• Assesses configurations against past, peers and best practices
• Takes corrective actions via policies (e.g. call out to Orchestrator)

Benefits

• Risk mitigation through improved visibility into ripple through effects
• Improve opex through visibility and streamlined remediation
• Integrates with existing products and processes
• Track, analyze, assess & take corrective actions to maintain configuration integrity

With the integration of vCenter Change Insight and Orchestrator you’re able to make custom mass configuration changes and corrections.

You better keep a close watch on the new vSphere Team blog "vThink IT", were David Friedlander and Bogomil Balkansky already have posted their first articles.

I've just discovered a new VMware corporate blog with the name “The Rain Makers”. The contributing author; Joao Crespo is working on a real cool document which provides a first insight to vCSD look and feel and assists on how to perform some basic administration tasks.

 

vCloud Network Isolation Backed - Create a network pool backed by vCloud isolated networks.  A vCloud isolated network spans hosts and provides traffic isolation from other networks.  The system provisions vCloud isolated networks automatically.

Update: The vCSD - Step by Step Guide was posted at http://communities.vmware.com/blogs/therainmakers/ but was made mistakenly available to the general community. It should have been availlable for registered Beta users only. It has been removed now.

Foundation for Cloud Computing with VMware vSphere 4, by John Arrasjid, Duncan Epping, and Steve Kaplan, is now online for members and available for purchase. Virtualization is recognized as a foundation for Cloud Computing. This book is an overview of the VMware technologies and how they can support the various services and management pieces required for Cloud architecture. Without diving overly deeply into specific design patterns, it provides insight into the tools to fit your design criteria.

http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2010/01/28/foundation-for-cloud-computing-with-vmware-vsphere-4/

Alan Renouf has just released version 3 of his Virtualization EcoShell PowerPack and it contains some great new features. In its short existence Alan’s PowerPack has already been downloaded over 2500 times. During the Dutch VMUG last Friday, I’ve presented a session which will give you a good insight into working with the Virtualization EcoShell and Alan’s PowerPack. Just to show you how easy it is to upgrade to the newest version, I’ve created a little Jing movie.

Continue reading "How to upgrade Alan Renouf’s Virtualization..." »

I’ve discovered a real cool German start-up and did a little interview with the director Andreas Wilke about their new automation appliance.
 
The ptecs automation appliance is not a product. It’s a collection of our best practices how we automate the daily needed tasks inside a VMware environment in the form of a VMware appliance. We are using the perl vSphere SDK Toolkit and developed two integrated modules:

• ptecs VMware AutoInstall: Fully automated pxe installation of esx hosts with network and software configuration. 
• ptecs VMware Toolkit: LifeCycle Management, Snapshot Management, Datastore Management and automated Management for Virtual Machines.
• Seamless integration of both modules inside the VMware vSphere Client as Plug-in.

We are able to automate all tasks the VMware SDK API delivers. Our main target is to reduce the daily workload of VMware administrators with automation of these tasks inside a VMware environment. In future we want to migrate the perl tasks to Orchestrator. At this time we want to implement a ESXi automated installation, a Health Check and a chargeback module.

Andreas has also posted some real cool videos at YouTube which gives you an insight at the paap virtual appliance. More information can be found on the ptecs website: http://www.ptecs.de next year.

   

vSphere 4.0 Quick Start Guide continues from an idea started several years ago by a few engineers. The idea was simple, provide an easy to use reference guide for all level administrators, consultants and architects. Recently VMware introduced many new features in vSphere 4.0 and with this handy pocket guide you will learn about each of these new features. With each chapter, the pages in this essential guide will answer common questions while giving you unprecedented insight into: Expert tips & tricks Pitfalls to avoid RemoteCLI & PowerCLI (PowerShell) scripts Configuration how to’s Virtualization best practices.

Dave Mishchenko
Duncan Epping
Bernie Baker
Thomas Bryant
Stewart Radnidge
Alan renouf