Eric Sloof

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Thursday, January 31. 2013

Video - vCert Manager

A massive area of pain for customers in a virtualized environment is managing SSL certificates and keys for components in the VMware stack. Currently under development, with a scheduled release in Q1 2013, the vCert Manager is a solution that provides automated management and operations of SSL Certificates in a VMware environment - a single pane of glass to create, manage, apply, custom SSL certificates for all of the products, including creating the certificate keys, signing request, applying to the Certificate Authority, and when the certificate is issued, to automatically apply it to the particular vSphere component.

vCert manager is available as a plug in install into vCenter, or vCenter Configuration Manager, it integrates at an API level with open SSL or an Enterprise CA such as Microsoft CA in addition to allowing manual import of existing certificates and public CA certificates that can then be applied by the system.

It integrates at an API level with the VMware stack of tools (vCenter Server, Update Manager, vShield Manager, vCenter Configuration Manager, vCenter Operations, vSphere Web Client, Virtual Infrastructure Navigator, vCenter Chargeback, SRM, vCloud Director, vCenter Heartbeat, ESX and ESXi Hosts, VMware View, or a subset of these based on discussions and priorities between VSS, ITS2K and VMware from versions compatible from vSphere 4.x onwards (v5.5 of vCenter Configuration Manager and 5.0 of vCenter Operations Only onwards only)

Has auto discovery of VM components (through vCenter, vCOps, vCloud and Linked Mode)
Upon initial installation of VM components, replaces temporary/ unsecure default certificates supplied with the VMware components with those supplied by the Enterprise CA.
Stores all VMware related certificates and VM account credentials in a secure database.
Keeps track of all expirations and revocations and allows an administrator to view upcoming expirations and automatically go apply for a new certificate
Allows role based access control and separation of duties between security admin and VI admin"

Via Michael Webster over at Long White Clouds - Automating vSphere SSL Cert Management – vCert Manager Beta Demo

Wednesday, January 30. 2013

New Technical White Paper - VMware vCloud Director 5.1 Performance and Best Practices

VMware vCloud Director 5.1 gives enterprise organizations the ability to build secure private clouds that dramatically increase datacenter efficiency and business agility. Coupled with VMware vSphere®, vCloud Director delivers cloud computing for existing datacenters by pooling virtual infrastructure resources and delivering them to users as catalog-based services. vCloud Director 5.1 helps you build agile infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud environments that greatly accelerate the time-to-market for applications and responsiveness of IT organizations.

This white paper addresses three areas regarding vCloud Director performance:

vCloud Director sizing guidelines and software requirements
Best practices in performance and tuning vCloud Director Architecture
Performance characterization and best practices for key vCloud Director operations and new features

Figure 1 shows the deployment architecture for vCloud Director. A user accesses vCloud Director through a Web browser or REST API. Multiple vCloud Director Server instances can be deployed with a shared database, and both Oracle and Microsoft SQL Server databases are supported.

A vCloud Director Server instance connects to one or multiple VMware vCenter Servers. From now on, we use vCloud Director Server instance and cell interchangeably.

VMware vCloud Director 5.1 Performance and Best Practices

Monday, January 28. 2013

Free Plugin for Creating, Managing Support Requests and Uploading Logs - VMware vCenter Support Assistant

VMware vCenter Support Assistant is a free, downloadable plug-in for vCenter Server. It provides an easy-to-use, secure, one-stop shop BOTH for creating and managing service requests AND generating and uploading logs. It also includes a VMware Knowledge Base search capability, which enables customers to resolve common issues more rapidly.

Support Assistant helps gather more of the information up front that VMware Technical Support finds useful. By minimizing further data requests from VMware Technical Support, vCenter Support Assistant can help reduce time to resolution and, in turn, minimize system downtime.

Download VMware vCenter Support Assistant

Wednesday, January 16. 2013

Cool Tool - Video: Storage Explorer (Free Utility)

Storage Explorer assesses storage performance and capacity views across datastores and VMs that helps VM admins to get better visibility of their storage environment. Storage Explorer, a utility within the vOPS Server Explorer freeware suite, displays storage performance and capacity views across datastores and VMs with the following features:

Identify critical VM issues such as low available disk space, high latency and throughput.
Allows user to sort on any metric to find specific issues relevant to them.
Identify critical datastore issues such as overcommitment, low capacity, high latency, VMFS version mismatch.

vOPS Server Explorer

New Training Course - VMware vSphere: Fast Track [V5.1]

This intensive, extended-hours training course focuses on installing, configuring, and managing VMware vSphere 5.1. This course combines the content of the VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage course with advanced tasks and skills for configuring a highly available and scalable virtual infrastructure. The course is based on VMware ESXi 5.1 and VMware vCenter Server 5.1. Completion of this course satisfies the prerequisite for taking the VMware Certified Professional 5 exam.

Students who complete this course may enroll in any of several more advanced vSphere courses. This training course is targeted at experienced system administrators and system integrators willing to work hard to achieve superior vSphere skills with minimal time away from the office.The objectives are:

Configure and manage ESXi networking and storage
Create, configure, migrate, manage, and monitor virtual machines and virtual appliances
Manage user access to the VMware virtual infrastructure
Use vCenter Server to monitor resource usage
Implement VMware vSphere® High Availability and VMware vSphere® Fault Tolerance (FT)
Use host profiles to manage ESXi configuration compliance
Use vSphere distributed switches to scale networking
Use profile-driven storage and VMware vSphere Storage DRS to scale storage
Use VMware vSphere Update Manager to apply ESXi patches
Use VMware vSphere Management Assistant (vMA) to manage vSphere
Deploy ESXi, vCenter Server, and VMware vCenter Server Appliance
Use VMware vSphere ESXi Image Builder CLI to create an ESXi image
Use VMware vSphere Auto Deploy to provision ESXi hosts

VMware vSphere: Fast Track [V5.1]

Monday, January 14. 2013

Cisco UCS Platform Emulator version 2.1 is now available for download

Cisco UCS Platform Emulator is the Cisco UCS Manager application bundled into a virtual machine (VM). The VM includes software that emulates hardware communications for the Cisco Unified Computing System. The UCS Platform Emulator (UCSPE) was developed to enable the use of Cisco UCS Manager and the UCS XML API without requiring physical hardware. UCSPE significantly shortens the development cycle for applications that are based on the UCS XML API. You can create and test programs using only UCSPE installed on a laptop.

UCSPE presents a controlled environment for the following:

Emulation of large-scale environments
Changes in the hardware inventory (device discovery)
Firmware upgrade testing
Troubleshooting real UCS problems

For example, you can use Cisco UCS Platform Emulator to create and test a supported Cisco UCS configuration, or to duplicate an existing Cisco UCS environment for troubleshooting or development purposes. Cisco UCS Platform Emulator supports both DHCP and static IP. By default, Cisco UCS Platform Emulator is configured to use the local network to obtain an IP address via DHCP. If your network does not include a DHCP server, you must assign a static IP address to Cisco UCS Platform Emulator.

After the initial deployment of the OVA completes, Cisco UCS Platform Emulator displays the management IP address in the VM console. If you assign a static IP address, the IP address persists across VM reboots. You can host Cisco UCS Platform Emulator using VMplayer, VMfusion and VMware vSphere ESXi.

Cisco UCS Platform Emulator 2.1.1aPE2.ova

UCS Emulator release notes and user guide

Friday, January 4. 2013

New Training Course - VMware vSphere: Skills for Operators [V5.1]

VMware is about to release a new training course. The vSphere Skills for Operators is a two-day technical classroom training course designed to help the operators and administrators to create and manage virtual machines. This two-day lecture and lab course will help students gain the skills required to work effectively with VMware virtual machines. This course is based on VMware vSphere ESXi 5.1 and VMware vCenter Server 5.1. After completing this course, students may enroll for other advanced vSphere courses.

The overall objective of this course is to provide students a strong understanding of VMware virtual machine features in vSphere 5.1. By the end of this course, the students should be able to do the following:

Describe virtualization, virtual machines, and vSphere components.
Describe the concepts of server, network, and storage virtualization.
Deploy, configure, and manage, and virtual machines.
Use vCenter Server to monitor virtual machine resource usage.
Use VMware vSphere® vMotion® and VMware vSphere® Storage vMotion® to migrate virtual machines.
Secure virtual machines.
Troubleshoot problems with virtual machine configuration.

Operators responsible for vSphere ESXi and vCenter Server management. The datasheet can be found here: VMware vSphere: Skills for Operators [V5.1]

Sunday, December 23. 2012

Technical Paper - Replacing Default vCenter 5.1 and ESXi Certificates

vSphere encrypts session information using standard digital certificates. Using the default certificates that vSphere creates might not comply with the security policy of your organization. If you require a certificate from a trusted certificate authority, you can replace the default certificate.

Certificate checking is enabled by default and SSL certificates are used to encrypt network traffic. However, ESXi and vCenter Server use automatically generated certificates that are created as part of the installation process and stored on the server system. These certificates are unique and make it possible to begin using the server, but they are not verifiable and are not signed by a trusted, well-known certificate authority (CA).

These default certificates are vulnerable to possible man-in-the-middle attacks. To receive the full benefit of certificate checking, especially if you intend to use encrypted remote connections externally, install new certificates that are signed by a valid internal certificate authority or public key infrastructure (PKI) service. Alternatively, purchase a certificate from a trusted commercial security authority. For information about encryption and securing your vSphere environment, see the vSphere Security documentation.

Replacing Default vCenter 5.1 and ESXi Certificates

Thursday, December 13. 2012

vCOPS 5.6 Integration in the VMware vSphere Web Client

vCenter Operations Manager 5.6 is the latest release of VMware's integrated operations suite, converging performance, capacity, and configuration management. This new release introduces the following features and enhancements.

This release introduces vCenter Operations Manager integration in the vSphere Web Client. Badges appear in the vSphere Web Client interface when you register an instance of VMware vCenter Operations Manager with a vCenter Server that you want to monitor. Your vCenter Operations Manager license determines which badges and widgets you can see in the vSphere Web Client.

Note: vCenter Operations Manger supports integration in the VMware vSphere Client for vCenter Server 5.1.

Wednesday, December 12. 2012

Controlling Virtual Machine Sprawl - How to Better Utilize Virtual Infrastructure

Virtualization not only improves hardware efficiency via server consolidation, itdramatically reduces the time required to bring a new server online from weeks or months to hours or minutes. This ability to bring machines online quickly provides companies with improved business agility. As with most improvements new issues can be created, and if not addressed, can reduce a virtual infrastructure’s overall efficiency over time.

Virtual machine sprawl is one of the biggest concerns facing many companies using desktop or server virtualization. The ability to quickly create virtual machines without the disciplines and controls of the physical world results in machines being provisioned unnecessarily without proper justification and approval, over-provisioned (too much CPU, memory, or disk), or consuming resources well after they no longer are required.

To address this concern, a number of reporting products have been created to help track and identify virtual machine sprawl. The problem with report-only products is they provide only a partial solution. They only help identify the problem and track it whether it is getting better or worse. They do nothing to prevent the problem or correct it once it has occurred. This white paper looks at how a cloud automation platform can help decrease virtual machine sprawl by automating the process of reducing, reusing, and recycling compute resources in a shared physical infrastructure.

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