Eric Sloof

Splunk easily crosses tiers throughout the entire virtual stack - both inside and outside of the VM - to give you a complete picture of availability. Splunk indexes all IT data across every tier - the physical servers, hypervisor, VMs, and deployed applications, capturing and persisting 100% of your data in real-time. Powerful search and navigation lets you trace performance problems and errors across components. Visibility across VMs highlights resource competition issues. Flexible alerting and reporting give you continuous visibility and monitoring of changing virtual environments. Whether you're testing a new virtualization rollout or managing an existing infrastructure, Splunk puts you back in control.

Why Splunk for Server Virtualization Management?

• Get a comprehensive view of 100% of your IT data - server, hypervisor, VM, guest OS, applications, network, and more.
• Increase visibility even with the greater complexity of virtualized environments.
• Optimize your initial planning and ongoing use of virtualization.
• Retain data from transient guests for root cause analysis and compliance.

Splunk's unique approach of indexing the entire IT infrastructure, both legacy and virtualized, enables end-end diagnostics and tuning to increase ROI. This is particularly powerful in today's datacenter that continue to carry the baggage of legacy non-virtualization applications while making a rapid transition to virtualization.

- Shaw Chuang, former Director of R&D for VMware ESX

Nexenta Storage Appliance (NexentaStor) is a software based network attached storage (NAS) appliance that meets the current feature sets of the best of breed NAS, including unlimited snapshots, snapshot mirroring (replication), NFS v3/v4, CIFS, and easy management of extremely large storage pools. NexentaStor delivers richly featured software in the form of a software appliance that is trivial to install and easy to manage.

NexentaStor Developer Edition: VMware Image will run unmodified on all VMware’s hosted products, including VMware Player, VMware Workstation and VMware Server for Windows and Linux, VMware Fusion for Mac.

Recommended environment:

• VMware ESX 3.x/Workstation 6.x/VMware Server 1.0.4+
• Linux/Windows/MacOSX host operating system
• 1GB of memory (512MB minimum)
• 10GB of free disk space (4GB minimum)

Getting started with NexentaStor Virtual Appliance is very easy – essentially it boils down to unzipping the downloaded image and running it in your preferred VMware environment.

Zenoss 2.3 includes improvements in Windows and Java application monitoring as well as native VMware management for Zenoss Enterprise Edition. Version 2.3 is also taking the opportunity to highlight over 30 new ZenPacks developed by the Zenoss community for expert monitoring of Asterisk PBX, Brocade Switches, Cisco Security Appliance, and many more. Zenoss Enterprise features Native, Agentless VMware Monitoring of Entire Virtualization Infrastructure.

• Automatic discovery and inventory of all Virtual Infrastructure (VI3) components including Virtual Machines, ESX Servers, clusters, and VMware data stores.
• Physical and Virtual resource usage and performance (memory, disk, CPU, and more).
• Real-time detection when Virtual Machines move from one VMware host (or ESX Server) to another (VMotion).
• Physical and Virtual performance and availability information correlated and displayed in a single, central web console.

The Virtual Appliances at Virtualappliances.net are nano-sized virtual machines for deploying instant infrastructure and applications. They are Ubuntu Server Edition 8.04 based and available for VMware, QEMU, KVM, Parallels, Xen, Virtual Iron, Virtural PC, and Virtual Server. Available Virtual Appliances are a LAMP Server, LAPP Server, Apache Tomcat Server, and Cacti Virtual Appliance. These are the smallest, most functional, and easiest to use Virtual Appliances available. They are certified for use on VMware and Parallels.

At virtualappliances.net you can download infrastructure oriented appliances. They have 5 different appliances available.

• LAMP Server provides an easy to use Linux/Apache/MySQL/Python/Perl/PHP development and deployment server.
• LAPP Server provides an easy to use Linux/Apache/PostgreSQL/Python/Perl/PHP development and deployment server.
• Apache Tomcat Server provides a J2EE Java application server.
• Cacti provides the popular network date collection and graphing application.
• NTOP provides the realtime network traffic analysis application.

These appliances are build on Ubuntu Linux. Updates and patches are very easy to manage with the appliances using Ubuntu's own repositories for update management. As well there are hundreds of applications that can be installed on the appliances from the Ubuntu repositories.

You can use this link to get access to the VMware Converter 4.0 Beta Program.

Welcome to the VMware Converter 4 beta program. We are excited to announce that VMware Converter 4 beta is now available. Your involvement in beta testing VMware Converter 4 is an important part of the release process, and your timely and thorough feedback is critical to the success of the beta program and to the release.

As part of this beta, we request you to extensively test several areas of feature enhancements including P2V support for Linux and Win 2K8 sources, hot cloning enhancements as well as workflow automation enhancements. Your active participation in this beta program is critical. We appreciate and value your efforts to install upon downloading the software and actively provide us with your valuable product feedback.

Continue reading "VMware Converter 4.0 Beta Program launched" »

This week I’m delivering the famous VMware Install and Configure course at XTG in the Netherlands. At the end of the third day it’s time for VMotion. Three ESX servers are added to one Virtual Center server  and the students have the task to make all their virtual machines VMotion compatible. I took this opportunity to upload the Replicate Technologies Datacenter Analyzer virtual appliances.  After uploading I converted the Probe appliance to a template and used the Internet Explorer to logon to the RDA Controller virtual machine. Just had to configure the Virtual Center server address and  user credentials, after that you’re ready to go. Update your analyses and kick off the probe deployment and the possible errors in your environment are presented at the Dashboard.  In my classroom there  was an issue with one of the virtual machines. This machine functions as a router and is booted from a floppy. Besides that it’s connected to an internal only virtual switch. Definitely some show stoppers for VMotion. One of the virtual machines had CPU affinity, RDA didn’t report the affinity setting, I posted a feature request at the forum. In the screen dumps you can see my findings. To conclude: easy setup, fast results, RDA rocks.

Jainoxi (Joep Piscaer) an active member of the Dutch VMUG also created a home setup of VMware’s Site Recovery Manager. He used the LeftHand Networks Virtual SAN appliance as a storage solution. You can find a complete how to at his new weblog Virtuallifestyle.nl.

As a demo/test I wanted to build a complete SRM setup with both sites being protected. This requires two SRM installations and configurations and two replicated LUN’s. Since I am rather limited in available hardware at the moment, I needed to run every component in a virtual Machine on a single laptop. Luckily, LeftHand Networks has a virtual SAN appliance, which actually is supported by VMware SRM. This way, I can use a supported SAN, and still use ony one laptop. All used software (VMware ESX, vCenter, LeftHand VSA and Microsoft SQL Server Express 2005) are available for free (or as evaluation software).

In this article I’ll give you a short demo how easy it is to create a PowerShell user interface with the free PrimalForms from Sapien. At the 4th of November Sapien released their first public version of PrimalForms. Jeffery Hicks over at Sapien reports :

I hope you are as excited about the release of PrimalForms as I am. In the past creating a Windows form in PowerShell was a very tedious task and one I rarely used except for the most simplest of forms. No more. The free PrimalForms tool lets me create a very rich Windows form using a WYSIWYG editor. I can export the form to a file, add my PowerShell code and call it a day.

First download PrimalForms at Sapien’s the free tools section. After installing, you just create a wonderful user interface and copy the PowerShell script  code to your clipboard.

In this example I created a button and a multiline text field. I copied my code to the PowerGui script editor and added a few lines of my own code. The following two lines are added to the top of the script.

Get-PSSnapin -registered | Add-PSSnapin -passthru -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
$Server = Connect-VIServer -Server 192.168.75.128 -User root -Password vmware

When you walk through the script you’ll see the sections where you can add your own code. In this example I added the following code under the button.

#Provide Custom Code for events specified in PrimalForms.
$button1_OnClick=
{
#TODO: Place custom script here
$textBox1.text = Get-VM
}

And here’s the result.

One of my weekend projects :-) is the evaluation of Replica Technologies Datacenter Analyzer. Yesterday evening I downloaded the Probe and RDA virtual appliances. This morning I started with importing the 2 virtual appliances into Virtual Center. I had to convert the Probe to a template and configure the RDA server. Everything went pretty straight forward. After a while I started my first analyses. To my great surprise RDA immediately confronted me with some faulty configured VM’s and Switches.  Oren Teich is following me on Twitter and posted this tweet. 

Have >10 people in the wild trying out RDA, including @scott_lowe, @depping, @esloof, & @matt_carpenter. I'm surprisingly nervous! about 10 hours ago from web.

Let’s wait and see what the others think about this new product, I’m very positive. When you click the thumbnail you will get a screen dump from my RDA Dashboard.

The PowerShell sessions at the VMworld were a big hit, VMware even had to upgrade the session rooms because of the high reservation numbers. Carter Chanklin, Product Manager at VMware's End User Enablement, recently started a new initiative, the VI toolkit extensions.


I'm really excited about the VI Toolkit Extensions as a way for us to make the common problems we see on our forums really easy to do. Just today, a user wanted to find all files on his datastores that contain the word "delta" (which can indicate a snapshot that hasn't been cleaned up properly). As it turns out, with the extensions this is just a one-liner. The art of PowerShell really seems to be the art of the one-liner and with the extensions there are already a lot of great one-liners you can use.
Here’s a short “how to” use the extensions:

Upgrade to Windows PowerShell 2.0 Community Technology Preview (CTP2).

Download Download the VI Toolkit (for Windows) 1.0.

Download the viToolkitExtension.psm1 module at Codeplex and place it somewhere on your local disk (I placed mine in c:\temp).

Start gPowerShell.exe (new in PowerShell 2.0) and paste the following code in the bottom window.

Add-Module "C:\Temp\viToolkitExtensions.psm1"
Get-PSSnapin -registered | Add-PSSnapin -passthru -ErrorAction SilentlyContinue
$Server = Connect-VIServer -Server 192.168.75.128 -User root -Password vmware
get-TkeOrphanedVmdk

When you take a look at the contents of the psm1 file there’s an interesting section : Half-baked stuff | New-OpenfilerIscsi.