Eric Sloof

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Monday, July 9. 2012

Registration is now open for the VCAP5-DCA Exam

VMware has released the VMware Certified Advanced Professional 5 Datacenter Administrator Exam. I've participated in the beta of this exam and can assure you that you're up for a challenge. You will get access to a laboratory and have to fulfill around 26 assignments in 4 hours.

The VDCA510 VMware Certified Advanced Professional on vSphere 5 – Datacenter Administration exam tests potential VCAP5-DCA candidates on their skills and abilities installing, configuring and administering large and/or more complex virtualized environments.

The VDCA510 exam consists of approximately 26 live lab activities and a short pre-exam survey consisting of 9 questions. Live lab activities consist of multiple tasks, where each task is scored. The total number of activities provided is based on the total number of tasks. Because of this, the actual number of lab activities may vary slightly between exams.

The passing score for this exam is 300. The scale is from 100-500. Scaled scores are calculated using a mathematical formula that considers a variety of factors, including the number and type of exam questions included in a specific version of the exam. Because this combination may vary in different versions of the same examination, scaled scores provide a fair score for each individual based on the version of the exam taken.

Points are awarded for the successful completion of each lab task. Most items on the exam are composed of several tasks, and partial credit is awarded for those tasks that are completed successfully. Candidates can choose to complete a task using different methods, as points are awarded based on successful completion, not on the steps used to complete the task.

Sign up today!

If you want to prepare for this exam, I can highly recommend attending the vSphere 5 - Optimize and Scale training course training. This course, for experienced VMware vSphere personnel, teaches advanced skills for configuring and maintaining a highly available and scalable virtual infrastructure. The course is based on VMware vSphere ESXi 5.0 and VMware vCenter Server 5.0.

The training prepares you for the VMware Certified Advanced Professional – Data Center Administration [V5] certification (VCAP5-DCA). Completion of this course also satisfies the prerequisite for taking the VMware Certified Professional 5 exam.

Friday, July 6. 2012

New Book - VMware vSphere 5 Building a Virtual Datacenter

The rapidly evolving field of virtualization and its many dimensions, can be confusing. This book is definitive practical guide for IT decision-makers and professionals responsible for evaluating, planning, implementing, or managing vSphere 5 in datacenter environments. Two world-class VMware virtualization consultants begin by concisely reviewing the fundamentals of modern virtualization with vSphere 5. They present overviews to the various datacenter elements-servers, storage, network, advantages, and functions; explain vSphere 5's architecture; and discuss main components including ESX and vCenter Server. With this foundation in place, they turn to implementation, presenting concrete examples, detailed schemas, and proven best practices drawn from their extensive consulting experience. Carefully balancing theory and practice, they demonstrate how to: * Accurately budget, schedule, plan, and manage vSphere 5 datacenter virtualization projects * Compare and evaluate architectural scenarios, and select the right approach for each environment and budget * Integrate vSphere with datacenter elements including servers, storage, clusters, network infrastructure, backup, and disaster recovery plans * Learn practical lessons from the experiences of leading enterprise customers * Implement high availability * And much more

Table of Contents

1. Servers Virtualizations to the Cloud

2. VMware VSphere 5 Software Components

3. Storage in VSphere 5

4. Servers and Network

5. High Availability and Disaster Recovery Plan

6. VSphere5 Protection

7. Installation and Management

8. How to Manage a Virtualization Project

http://www.pearsonitcertification.com/store/product.aspx?isbn=0321832213

Thursday, June 28. 2012

A whitebox is for sissies - Real men use a Super Workstation

During my search for a new VMware homelab server, I’ve seen many models that were suitable to run ESXi 5. I specifically searched for a model that’s able to hold loads of memory and has dual CPU sockets. The nice thing about the Super Workstation is that VMware has certified the system and it is listed in the hardware compatibility matrix. Sander over at twp.nl as configured the Supermicro 7047A-TB tower with 128 GB of memory (16 x Kingston 8GB DDR3 1333mhz ECC REG) and two 2 x Intel E5-2603 1.8Ghz Quadcores for a total price of € 2465,00.

The 7047A-TB tower is a high-end workstation comprised of two main subsystems: the SC743TQ-1200B-SQ tower/4U chassis and the X9DA7/X9DAi dual Intel® Xeon® processor server board. In addition to the server board and chassis, various hardware components have been included with the SuperWorkstation 7047A-73/7047A-T, as listed below:

Two 8-cm hot-swap PWM "SuperQuiet" chassis fans
One 9-cm PWM "SuperQuiet" exhaust fan
Two active CPU heatsinks
SAS/SATA Accessories
One SAS/SATA backplane
One iPass cable
Eight hot-swap drive carriers

At the heart of the SuperWorkstation 7047A-73/7047A-T lies the X9DA7/X9DAi, a dual processor serverboard based on the Intel® C600 chipset. Below are the main features of the X9DA7/X9DAi.The X9DA7/X9DAi supports single or dual Intel E5-2600 processors in LGA 2011 sockets.

The X9DA7/X9DAi has sixteen DIMM slots that can support up to 512 GB of registered/unbuffered ECC DDR3-1600/1333/1066/800 LRDIMMs (load-reducedDIMMs). The X9DA7 includes an LSI 2308 SAS controller, which supports eight SAS2 ports. The hot-swap SAS drives are connected to a backplane that provides power, bus termination and configuration settings.

A SATA controller is integrated into the chipset to provide a Serial ATA subsystem that supports RAID 0, 1, 5 and 10 (RAID 5 is not supported with Linux OS). The SATA drives are hot-swappable units. The 7047A-73 (X9DA7) supports two SATA 3.0 and four SATA 2.0 ports while the 7047A-T (X9DAi) supports six SATA 3.0 and four SATA 2.0 ports.

Thursday, June 21. 2012

Performance Study - VMware vCenter 5.0 in Remote Offices and Branch Offices

As VMware vCenter has become the most popular tool to manage VMware vSphere ESXi hosts and virtual machines (VMs), customers have deployed vCenter in many networks, such as local area network (LAN) with high-bandwidth and low-latency links, and wide area network (WAN) with low-bandwidth and high-latency links.

Deploying vCenter in a remote offices and branch offices (ROBO) environment is a representative use case for customers who have ESXi hosts distributed over large geographical distances. These customers choose to centralize the management of ESXi hosts and VMs by keeping only one vCenter and configuring it to manage ESXi hosts over WAN.

To help customers understand vCenter performance over WAN, VMware has studied the performance of VMware vCenter Server 5.0 in the ROBO environment in this white paper. First, to establish a baseline, we evaluated the time and bandwidth consumption of vCenter tasks over LAN (high bandwidth, low latency). Then, VMware evaluated the time and bandwidth consumption of vCenter tasks in five representative WAN (low bandwidth, high-latency) cases.

The experimental results show that vCenter performs well in the ROBO environment in terms of both time and bandwidth consumption. For a vCenter task, time consumption increases very slowly when network latency1 increases by several times. Furthermore, network bandwidth is not saturated even if it decreases from 1.5 Mbps to 64 Kbps.

http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/techpaper/VMW-WP-Performance-vCenter.pdf

Available for download - VMware WSX Server for Windows

This feature is still HIGHLY experimental at this time. This yet to be officially named service enables users to access their Shared virtual machines via a web browser without installing any plug-ins or web controls. This service renders an HTML5 web page that can connect to your Workstation hosts or ESXi servers (requires vSphere 5.0), enumerate the available virtual machines and allow you to power them on and interact with the desktop. Both the Windows .msi and Linux .bundle installations are available for download as part of the Technology Preview.

This software has several limitations

You must be on the same network as your host to access you VMs. This feature requires a very modern browser that supports HTML5 with WebSockets. We have had success with Chrome 17, Firefox 10, IE 10 (currently not as well supported), Safari 5 on Mac OS hosts and iOS 5 on the iPad. This may work with other browsers and on Android tablets running Ice Cream Sandwich with the latest version of Google Chrome installed, but we need to do more testing to get a more complete list. This feature is not scalable. VMware has not yet tested this for scalability and only expect it to work well for a couple of concurrent connections.

To run WSX on a Windows host

Install WSX and choose a port
Open a browser http://localhost:8888 (port defined above)
The login and password that you need to use is your system login and password

To run WSX on a Linux host

Ensure that your Linux server has Python 2.6 installed!!!
Install WSX and choose a port
Launch the server by typing: sudo /etc/init.d/vmware-wsx-server start
Open a browser http://localhost:8888 (port defined above)
The login and password that you need to use is your system login and password
You can go to the configuration page and add additional hosts.

For more information about WSX you can read this blog post from the lead developer Christian Hammond http://blog.chipx86.com/.

Source: VMware Workstation Technology Preview - June 2012 Overview

Friday, June 15. 2012

New Training - VMware vCloud 1.5 Design Best Practices

VMware has released a new training course. This three days of instructor-led training course is designed to guide students through the decision points and policy choices available for designing and implementing a VMware vCloud environment. Students will learn to appreciate the effects of design choices in VMware vSphere, VMware vCloud Director, VMware vCenter Chargeback, and the VMware vShield Edge capability that is included with vCloud Director. The course culminates in a comprehensive workshop on VMware cloud design. By the end of the course, you should have an understanding of the VMware cloud and be able to do the following:

Evaluate and design a multitenant environment to address both private cloud and public cloud customer needs.
Configure vCloud providers that can accommodate heterogeneous server, storage, and network resources.
Design a network infrastructure optimized for vCloud.
Integrate vCloud Director security with existing LDAP systems and design appropriate security hierarchies with security roles.
Design a vCenter Chargeback implementation.

Course Datasheet

Wednesday, June 6. 2012

Why Choose VMware vSphere 5 for VDI? Comparison to Microsoft Hyper-V and Citrix XenServer

Today, Virtualization Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) is a key initiative for many organizations looking to reduce administrative overhead while providing a more secure, flexible and reliable desktop computing environment for end users. Proper planning and good decision making are required to ensure a successful deployment. Choosing the right virtualization platform to host the virtual desktop implementation is often the first major decision and— to a large degree— can make or break the entire transformation. Important considerations when choosing the best VDI platform include:

Does the platform provide the features, reliability, and high availability to meet the business requirements?
Is the platform reliable and proven?
Does the platform provide a secure foundation for all the virtual desktops?
Can the infrastructure be standardized on the same platform as the existing server virtualization?
How will the choice made today impact future migration to a cloud environment?
How does the VDI platform choice impact options for a VDI solution?

Based on the above criteria, the best choice for most VDI deployments is vSphere because:

vSphere is the leading virtualization platform and provides unbeatable reliability, high availability, business continuity, and fault tolerance.
Customers can standardize on a common cloud infrastructure platform from the desktop through the datacenter and to the cloud.
VMware View and vSphere integration maximizes the benefits of the leading virtualization platform for VDI.

This paper takes a look at each of these attributes in the context of the unique needs of the VDI market.

Tuesday, June 5. 2012

Cool Tool - VM Aware Database Performance - Completely FREE

CONFIO SOFTWARE has just released a new version of their IgniteVM software that is completely free. IgniteFreeVM takes the core feature, multi-layer visibility of databases running on VMware, from application through the storage layer, and makes it available in a free-of-charge tool for unlimited use. It differs from the paid version in a few respects – it does not have the advanced enterprise features such as reporting and alerting, and it is limited to a two hour rolling window, rather than seeing months of history.

IgniteFreeVM will be of interest to Oracle and SQL Server DBAs who have databases running on VMware. It will also be useful for VMware administrators who need to ensure success of databases on their platform and want low impact, easily understood views of how the database is using VMware resources.

http://www.ignitefree.com/

Thursday, May 31. 2012

New Training - VMware vCenter Operations Manager: Analyze and Predict [V5.0]

This course, for experienced VMware vSphere personnel, teaches skills for the use of VMware vCenter™ Operations as a forensic and predictive tool. The course is based on VMware vSphere ESXi 5.0, VMware vCenter Server 5.0, and vCenter Operations Manager 5.0.

• Understand major and minor badges and their underlying metrics.

• Use these badges to find root causes of common operational issues in a vSphere environment.

• Perform capacity management and what-if analyses.

• Use the Operations tab, the Planning tab, the Alerts tab, the Analysis tab, and the Reports tab.

• Navigate the vCenter Operations Manager 5.0 user interface.

• Use heat maps and create a custom heat map.

• Use smart alerts to detect system issues.

Course Datasheet

Tuesday, May 29. 2012

VMworld 2012 - Call for Papers Public Voting is Now Open

This year you can have a say in what sessions you would like to see at VMworld 2012. Public Voting ends at June 8th. You can vote for the sessions you would like to see. I’ve submitted 4 sessions which are available for public voting. If you are intrested in SQL 2012, Windows 8, Snapshots or the famous Mythbusters - Please put "Sloof" into the filter options and Click on the “Thumbs Up” symbol next to the Session ID. You will receive confirmation that your vote has been counted - Thanks in advance. Here's a list of the sessions. The first two are solo, the other two are duo presentations with Mattias Sundling and Michael Wilmsen.

1478 Hosting Microsoft SQL Server 2012 on vSphere 5 – Best Practices
This session provides best practice guidelines for properly preparing the vSphere 5 platform to run SQL Server 2012.
1479 Tuning Windows 8 for Best Performance in VMware View 5
This session provides guidelines on configuring Windows 8 to be used within a VMware View 5.1 Infrastructure.
1616 Mythbusting Goes Virtual (with Mattias Sundling)
Based on the successful concept of fun, different and educational, the Mythbusting team is back with new virtualization myths! We have collected a series of hot topics that have been widely discussed in virtualization communities, on blogs and on Twitter. Now, we have put these topics to the test in our lab to determine if they are a myth or not.
1871 Snapshots Deepdive (with Michael Wilmsen)
Creating virtual machine snapshots is one of the most common tasks for an administrator Making a snapshot of a virtual machine is one of the most common tasks an administrator can do with a virtual machine. Snapshots make our life must easier by providing a robust roll-back scenario when performing a upgrade or when we change the configuration of a virtual machine. Snapshots are quest independent and easy to use. Snapshots can also be a real nightmare when used wrong. Datastores can fill up resulting in a virtual machine (suspension) crash., you’re unable to delete snapshots and backup programs leaving unmanageable snapshots behind. These are all common issues that can occur when using snapshots. What about the size of a snapshot file, how large can a snapshot file grow? This session will give you a deepdive in how snapshot actually work in the different version of vSphere and how you can solve common problems when working with snapshots.

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