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Connecting Clouds in The vArchitect Blog

Posted by jadelzein May 15, 2012

For those organizations on the journey of transforming their datacenters to meet the demand of a modern IT consumption model, it’s easy to envision what cloud euphoria could/should look like.  That’s mostly because vision is quite cheap – all it takes is a little imagination (maybe), a few Google queries, several visits by your favorite vendor(s), and perhaps a top-down mandate or two.  The problem is execution can break the bank if the vision is not in line with the organization’s core objectives.  It’s easy to get carried away in the planning stages with all the options, gizmos and cloudy widgets out there – often delaying the project and creating budget shortfalls.  Cloud:Fail.  But this journey doesn’t have to be difficult (or horrendously expensive).  Finding the right solution is half the battle…just don’t go gluing several disparate products together that were never intended to comingle and burn time and money trying to integrate them.  Sure you might eventually achieve something that resembles a cloud, but you’re guaranteed to hit several unnecessary pain points on the way.

 

Of course I’m not suggesting putting all your eggs in one vendor’s basket guarantees success.  Nor am I suggesting that VMware’s basket is the only one that provides everything you’ll ever need for a successful cloud deployment.  In fact, VMware prides itself with an enormous (and growing) partner ecosystem that provides unique approaches and technologies to cloudy problems and beyond.  What I am suggesting, however, is the need to pick and choose wisely.  Well integrated clouds = well functioning clouds = happy clouds and happy customers.  Integration means common frameworks and interfaces, extensible API’s, automation via orchestration, app portability across clouds, and technologies that are purpose-built for the job(s) at hand.  And as a bonus, integration can mean leveraging what you already have – an infrastructure awaiting the transformation of a lifetime.  That’s right, the cloud journey should not be a rip-and-replace proposition.

 

There’s another major component to this – while I spend the majority of my time helping organizations and federal agencies adopt the cloud and transform their infrastructures, there’s often something else on the customer’s mind that can’t be ignored.  It’s a long-term strategy delivered in nine datacenter-shattering words: “I want to get out of the infrastructure business”.   I’m hearing this more often than not and it cannot be ignored.  What they are referring to is the need to eventually shift workloads to public clouds rather than continue to invest in their own infrastructures.  This strategy makes perfect sense.  As the adoption of public cloud services increases, more and more CIO’s are finding new comfort levels in handing over their apps and workloads to trusted cloud providers, albeit slowly.  But this also introduces new challenges.  How does an organization well on its way to delivering an enterprise/private cloud to the business ensure that future adoption of public clouds does not mean starting from scratch?  What about managing and securing those workloads just as you would in the private cloud?  Public cloud providers need to be an extension of your private cloud, giving you the freedom of application placement, the ability to migrate workloads back and forth, and providing single-pane-of-glass visibility into all workloads and all clouds.  This endeavor requires the right planning, tools, and frameworks to be successful.

 

Here are the top “asks” from customers currently on, or getting ready to start, this journey (in no particular order):

  • Private cloud now…public cloud later (or both…now)
  • Workload portability (across clouds / cloud providers)
  • A holistic management approach
  • End-to-end visibility
  • Dynamic security
  • Cloud-worthy scalability

 

If any of this is resonating, then you’re probably in a similar situation.  CIO’s are pushing the deployment of private clouds while simultaneously considering public cloud options.  Therefor the solution needs to deliver everything we know and love of the private cloud while laying down the framework for public cloud expansion.  Problem is not many solutions out there can do this.  Public cloud providers often run proprietary frameworks and management tools to keep costs low and private cloud solutions are generally focused on just that (being private).

 

Enter VMware.

 

VMware has put a lot of effort in leveraging the success of vSphere – the cloud’s critical foundation – to help take a controlling lead up the software stack and deliver a cloud solution for both private and public (i.e. hybrid) clouds.  And through the VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP), they have also enabled a new generation of cloud service providers that build their offerings using the same vCloud frameworks available to enterprises.  As a result, each and every one of these vCloud-powered service providers instantly becomes a possible extension of your private cloud, placing the power of the hybrid cloud – and all the “asks” above – at your fingertips.

 

Here’s what that looks like from a 1,00ft view…

CIM Stack.jpg

Let’s review this diagram:

 

1 – Physical Infrastructure: commodity compute, storage, and network infrastructure.

2 – vSphere Virtualization: hardware abstraction layer and cloud foundation.  Delivers physical compute, storage, and networks as resource pools, datastores, and portgroups (or dvPortgroups).

3 – Provider Virtual Datacenter (PvDC) and Organizational Virtual Datacenter (OvDC): delivered by vCloud Director as the first layer of cloud abstraction. resources are simply consumed as capacity and delivered on demand.

4 – vCenter Orchestrator: key technology for cloud integration, automation, and orchestration across native and 3rd-party solutions.

5 – vCenter Operations: holistic management framework for visibility into performance, capacity, compliance, and overall health.

6 – Security & Compliance: dynamic, policy-based security and compliance tools across clouds using vShield Edge and vCenter Configuration Manager (vCM)

7 – VMware Service Manager for Cloud Provisioning (VSM-CP): self-service web portal and business process engine tying it all together.  Integrates with vCO for mega automation.

8 –vCloud Connector (vCC): single pane of glass control of clouds and workloads.  enables workload portability to/from private and public vClouds and traditional vSphere environments.

 

Last but not least is the very important question of “openness” in the cloud (don’t get me started on heterogeneous hypervisors!).  VMware spearheaded the OVF standard several years ago, which has been adopted by the industry as a whole as a means of migrating vSphere-based workloads to non-vSphere hypervisors (and the clouds above them) with metadata in tact.  In fact, OVF remains a key technology in the Hybrid cloud scenarios and is an integral part of workload portability across clouds.  OVF gives customers the ability to move workloads in/out of vSphere and vCloud environments and into other solutions that support the standard.  Just beware of solutions that will happily accept OVF workloads but not so happily give them back (warning: the majority won’t).

 

The end result: cloud goodness, happy CIO’s, and streamlined IT.  How’s that for a differentiator?

 

++++

@virtualjad

 

Follow virtualjad on Twitter

116 Views 0 Comments Permalink Tags: performance, vmware, security, infrastructure, management, virtualization, portable, api, architecture, ovf, foundation, director, orchestrator, federal, interoperability, vcloud, vcenter, vsphere, portability, cloud, cloud_computing, vco, vsphere_api, vcloud_api, vsm, service_manager, vcloud_director, service_providers, vcops, business_agility, it_agility, vcloud_service_providers, heterogeneous
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Over the weekend, one of my ex-colleagues reached out to me for my input on running SQL in a 2 node Microsoft Cluster. Of course, these servers were supposed to be VMs and all that. Now my initial reaction was, yeah sure you can do all this but there are restrictions that are placed on VMs that are part of MSCS. This included, affinity rules, exceptions in DRS, limited to two nodes only and all the other stuff that goes along with it. Read more..

53 Views 0 Comments Permalink Tags: mscs, vmotion, rdp, drs, ha, alwayson, vsphere, sql2012, wfc
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Got some syslog files without CR/LF characters to analyze... only a "<166>" string on the place of the newline.

 

If needed, you can use this simple script to resolve it:

 

cat syslog.4.log | sed 's/<166>/\
/g' > syslog.4.log.ok

 

(there is really an newline on the command, so the <166> will be replaced by a newline...

37 Views 0 Comments Permalink Tags: syslog, newline, sed, cr, lf
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Hi Guys

 

Today we migrated our vcenter and Update manager db's to another DB server.  The article below was followed however the Update Manager doesnt connect when vCenter is opened.  I get the error  " There was an error connecting to VMware vCenter Update Manager - [server:443]. Database temporarily unavailable or has network connections.

 

I have confirmed ODBC is correct etc.  We're running VuM 4.1.

 

Thanks

 

dean

 

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?cmd=displayKC&docType=kc&docTypeID=DT_KB_1_1&externalId=1003928

15 Views 0 Comments Permalink
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esxtop good kb in john23's Blog

Posted by john23 May 15, 2012
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Trong quá trình thử nghiệm self-serivice cho người dùng qua vCloud Director .

Có thể các bạn sẽ gặp phải lỗi màn hình đen khi console VM qua giao diện quản trị của VCD mặc dù đã cài đầy đủ vcd plug-in và rõ ràng vẫn thấy vApp đang running nhưng khi pop-up console bật lên thì chỉ thấy màn hình đen và đợi hoài chẳng thấy gì . ( Xem hình )

 

vcloud2.png

 

 

 

Lỗi khi console :

 

vcloud3.png

 

Sau 1 thời gian hỏi người anh em Google , mình đã tìm ra nguyên nhân là do vCenter của mình chưa cài Web Access Client .

Để fix , chỉ cần cài Web Access Client lên và truy cập vào :

 

https://vcenter:9443/vsphere-client/

 

Sau đó Download VMware Remote Console Plug-In for Mozilla Firefox về cài :

 

vcloud4.png

 

Kết quả Console lại trên vCloud Director :

 

Chúc các bạn thành công .

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Recently, VMware announced vFabric Application Director product to  enable application deployments on public and private clouds. This is one  initiative that gained momentum over a period of time in VMware and  after a lot of thought process, my engineering team has finally  delivered a product that meets not only current workload requirements  that run within VMs but also enables future application stacks like  Django, Ruby on Rails, NodeJS alongwith noSQL and SQL databases. The  other key aspect that we have kepty under constant consideration is   deploying these variety of apps on variety of platforms - public,  private, amazon, openstack,.. We believe as developers will try various  appstacks so will they try various cloud environments for different  reasons. We want to give this freedom of choice to developers while  helping them keep their applications abstracted enough to land into the  right production ready vCloud environments eventually.

 

 

Screen shot 2012-05-14 at 11.25.18 AM.png


Enabling IT towards their journey to PAAS

When we look at current ( sometimes refered as legacy!) application stacks like JEE and SOA architectures , these apps have a specific requirement in terms of boot order for various app components. New app frameworks have moved away from this specific boot order requirements. With the advent of nosql databases, this arena is changing very fast. We went through lot of thought process creating Application Director - how do we satisfy current workloads but also build a product that is futuristic  - one that paves a clear path for Platform as a Service model. Platform as a Service Model expects IT to follow a narrow set of application stack and if your IT environments can standardize on certain set of application stacks, you can harness the power of PAAS model : automated app lifecycle management - seamless updates to middleware and monitoring of workloads and so on. The question though is : are current IT administrators ready for PAAS? When we talk to customers, we find them in various phases of readiness for PAAS : ranging from tons of application types spread wide across in IT datacenters and there is no way they can bring them together to other side of spectrum - "we have disciplined our developers to follow specific application stacks and we are looking forward to operation-less IT through PAAS." Enabling customers to go from first end of the spectrum to the nirvana state of PAAS, is where vFabric Application Director fits right in - enabling customers towards their journey to PAAS - helping them  first with creating inventory of appstacks used in their private clouds and extended public clouds. Then help them curate their environment , reducing the plethora of appstacks to fewer standardized appstacks while still enabling a wide range of selection of appstacks for their developers.

 

What to expect in coming blog posts

In coming series of blogs we will go in details of specific features of vFabric Application Director, we will also talk about differences between various cloud environments and how Application Director works to enable the richness of various clouds shine through. We will go in architectural details around multitenancy, hybrid cloud abstraction layer, auto-generation of execution plan from application blueprints and rich troubleshooting around complex applications. We will talk about setting up a customized self service portal for developers and QE in your teams to deploy applications abstracting them from virtual machines, compute, network and storage details, thereby enabling them to focus on what matters most for them - business logic and business needs around their applications. Standardization will be another area of focus where we will talk about standardization at various levels : catalog of middleware services, blueprints and deployment profiles. But first we will start with introducing the key concepts in details.

 

Stay tuned,

Komal Mangtani

Engineering Director,

VMware

83 Views 0 Comments Permalink Tags: vmware, application, director, vsphere, alm, springsource, vfabric
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Well, it's May. Still on 32-bit gear, still no budget, still nothing. . . . Except for a new Big Boss who treats IT as an expense to be minimized.

 

I don't think I need to hang around here much longer.

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http://www.virtualmachines.net

Virtual Machines.net is a certified VMware hosting provider offering VMware based hosting solutions for virtual machines, virtual dedicated servers, disaster recovery, and private cloud hosting for total it continuity

24 Views 1 Comments Permalink Tags: virtual, vmware, disaster, recovery, machines, hosting, private, cloud, |
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From the editors Virtual Desk
Hi everyone, a bit of a later than usual newsletter this week as I find myself out of Australia for a short while however I still wanted to try and bring you a newsletter this week.

There is loads of news and even some new product updates that are extremely exciting and of course as usual I urge you to please check the KB articles for any potential issues that may affect you.

Enjoy the newsletter everyone.

Warm Wishes
Neil Isserow (Newsletter Editor and VMware TAM Blog Custodian)
Queensland Technical Account Manager
TWITTER: @VMWARETAM
BLOG: blogs.vmware.com/tam
Newsletter Archive: communities.vmware.com/blogs/vmwaretam

VMWARE USER GROUP (VMUG)
http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/vmug
The VMware User Group is an independent, global, customer-led organization, which maximizes members’ use of VMware and partner solutions through knowledge sharing, training, collaboration, and events.

VMWARE EDUCATION AND CERTIFICATION
Live Online Learning
VMware live online learning is the perfect solution for professionals who want to attend VMware training but would prefer not to travel. Through this delivery method, our expert instructors deliver the same high-quality courses and hands-on experiences as in our traditional classroom courses – minus the travel. Learn more.

VMWARE OFFICIAL BLOGS AND NEWS
VMware Virtualization Management Blog: VMware Center for Policy & Compliance Releases VIEW Hardening Guidelines
As VMware continues to build Trusted Cloud solutions that help customers migrate tier one applications to our Cloud Infrastructure Suite (CIS), the Center for Policy & Compliance (CP&C) released VIEW hardening guidelines in vCenter Configuration Manager (vCM), a major component of the vCenter Operations Manager Suite. (vC Ops)

VMware vSphere Blog: Backup Design for vCloud Director Tenant vApps Whitepaper
A new whitepaper was recently released by VMware called Backup Design for vCloud Tenant vApps to help provide guidance to partners looking to design and build backup solutions for tenant vApps running in vCloud Director. The document covers the complete process for a backup and restore of a vApp or individual Virtual Machines running in vCloud Director. It also covers several different use cases related to the backup and restore process and provides recommendations on the specific scenarios.

VMware for Small-Medium Business Blog: Making Things Easier with My VMware
Managing product licenses and support entitlements can be a time consuming task for any IT organization big or small.  We know that the more products and vendors you add to the mix the more tedious this process can become.  The recent launch of My VMware has taken on the challenge from our customers to make the process of managing your VMware licenses and support entitlements easier so you can focus on managing your VMware infrastructure and delivering more value to your business.

VMware vSphere Blog: ESXi Image Builder and Auto Deploy PowerCLI Quick Reference
To help the PowerCLI novice get started with Image Builder and Auto Deploy I put together the attached quick reference guides.
Working with the ESXi Image Builder and Auto Deploy cmdlets in vSphere 5.0 was my first experience using PowerShell/PowerCLI, and early on I know I spent a lot of time just trying to keep track of the different cmdlet names, let alone the syntax.  As I’ve had several requests for some kind of Image Builder and Auto Deploy PowerCLI quick reference guide I suspect I’m not unique.  I hope these will prove helpful.

Office of the CTO Blogs: Honeybees and Discovering the Next Big Thing
I had an amazing experience recently helping a friend set up a beehive on her property.  Throughout the process, I was taken with the intricate details of how a hive functions and the role of each bee and their CEO, the queen.  I wondered how much of their elaborate system of egg nurturing to honey-making was simply a matter of evolution or if it was more complex than that.  So, I did a little research...

VMware End User Computing: View Storage Accelerator - In Practice
By Narasimha Krishnakumar, Staff Product Manager, End-User Computing
This post details how to use View Storage Accelerator. Read my previous post for an overiew on View Storage Accelerator: VMware EUC Portfolio: Optimizing Storage with View Storage Accelerator
Let's get right into it. VMware View 5.1 exposes the View Storage Accelerator feature at pool creation time.  As shown below in Figure 1., Desktop administrators can choose to use host caching at pool creation time through the Advanced Storage Options configuration screen. 

VMware vCloud Blog: Riverbed and VMware Improve Performance for Moving Workloads Between Clouds
Earlier this week, Riverbed Technology announced a continued partnership with VMware that is designed to help enterprises make better (and faster) use of cloud technologies. Riverbed makes WAN optimization gear that accelerates and makes WAN traffic more efficient. They’re integrating the Riverbed gear with VMware vCloud Connector to help IT departments optimize the transfer of VMs from one data center to another.

VMware vCloud Blog: vCloud Director Ultimate Resource Guide (URG) - Spring 2012
With hundreds of thousands of VMware vSphere admins out there, resources to learn vSphere and troubleshoot vSphere are plentiful. However, those same vSphere admins are now making the push to try out and learn about vCloud Director. This post is intended to be the ultimate vCloud Director Resource Guide, providing links to all the resources you need to learn about and troubleshoot vCD.

VMware vSphere Blog: VMFS Locking Uncovered
In one of my very first blog posts last year around the new improvements made to VMFS-5 in vSphere 5.0, one of the enhancements I called out was related to the VAAI primitive ATS (Atomic Test & set). In the post, I stated that the 'Hardware Acceleration primitive, Atomic Test & Set (ATS), is now used throughout VMFS-5 for file locking.' This recently led to an obvious, but really good question (thank you Cody) - What are the operations that ATS now does in vSphere 5.0/VMFS-5 that it didn’t do in vSphere 4.1/VMFS-3?

VMware vCloud Blog: Some More vCloud Director Configuration Maximums
A question was asked yesterday regarding some of the configuration maximums that are currently not listed in the vSphere 5 configuration maximums document. Having discussed with vCloud Engineering and Product Management it has been confirmed that these numbers are used to provide the supported scale of vCloud Director and can be published to the wider community.

VMware vFabric Blog: VMware Partner Viewpoint:
5 Reasons Why You Should Care about vFabric
It’s hard to argue that cloud computing has the CIO’s attention across all industries, and a whole new breed of technology companies wouldn’t exist without cloud computing. In this article, we share a summary of six VMware vFabric partner interviews. These perspectives identify 5 themes for how VMware’s vFabric cloud application development platform can improve developer productivity, cut customer technology costs, solve key engineering problems, and more.

VMware vSphere Blog: Have you seen that VMware has joined the Open Compute Project? If not, check it out!
Many of us have been looking for the latest innovations in datacenter design for a long time. Well, this new project might be it. The Open Compute Project started not too long ago by Facebook, has a simple goal of making the datacenter run more efficiently than ever before at the lowest possible cost. Since this is an architecture VMware wanted to support as customers move toward more cloud architectures, we have certified vSphere 5 on both its Intel and AMD versions. VMware believes The Open Compute Project platform is suitable for many virtualization use cases. For example, we have been working with Facebook to deploy VMware vSphere 5.0 on these platforms inside Facebook's internal IT infrastructure in addition to many others.

Office of the CTO Blogs: VMware vSphere Support of Hyperscale and Embedded Servers, Part II
Yesterday, I promised to discuss even more choices for the hyperscale data center with vSphere. Let me start with the big news first.

Today we are announcing that VMware joined the Open Compute Project. The big goal of the project is: "to build one of the most efficient computing infrastructures at the lowest possible cost". "By releasing Open Compute Project technologies as open hardware, our goal is to develop servers and data centers following the model traditionally associated with open source software projects."[1]

VMware vSphere Blog: Combining affinity rule types
Recently a customer asked if host-vm affinity rules and VM-VM anti-affinity rules can be combined and what the impact and caveats are of this particular configuration.
Example scenario In this scenario two virtual machines run an application that is clustered at application level. Virtual machine 1 and 2 provide the service of App-cluster1, similar clusters are configured on VM3-VM4 and VM5-VM6. The compute cluster contains 6 ESXi hosts. The customer requires each app-cluster contained on its own hosts, during normal operations no app-cluster should share an ESXi host. The virtual machine within the app cluster cannot share the same ESXi host.

VROOM!: IBM solidDB Universal Cache on VMware vSphere 5.0
VMware recently released a white paper showing the performance scalability of virtualized IBM solidDB Universal Cache and IBM DB2 on the IBM System x3850 X5 server with MAX5, using VMware vSphere 5.0.  This paper shows that the virtualized IBM solidDB Universal Cache environment achieves excellent performance and scalability on a typical online transaction processing (OLTP) system in today’s enterprise.

VMware End User Computing: VMware EUC Portfolio: VMware Horizon Application Manager 1.5
The VMware Horizon application manager team is very excited to announce Horizon Application Manager 1.5. The product will be available this quarter as a new virtual appliance, allowing the product to be installed on a customer’s premise for the first time ever. This version will also be sold through VMware’s channel and sales force and made available internationally for the first time.

VMware End User Computing: VMware EUC Portfolio: View Composer Array Integration Tech Preview
It is a pleasure to announce View Composer API for Array Integration (VCAI) with the new version of VMware View, View 5.1.
Offered in VMware View 5.1 as a Tech Preview, VCAI leverages the native cloning abilities in the storage array to offload storage operations within a VMware View environment.  As a result, VCAI improves provisioning speeds and management in View Composer and offers another solution for customers wanting to leverage other storage options.

VMware End User Computing: VMware EUC Portfolio: Optimizing Storage with View Storage Accelerator
We are excited to announce a new feature with VMware View 5.1 – VMware View Storage Accelerator.  View Storage Accelerator (formerly known as Content Based Read Cache) optimizes storage load and improves performance by caching common image blocks when reading virtual desktop images, helping to reduce overall TCO in VMware View deployments.

Office of the CTO Blogs: VMware vSphere Support of Hyperscale and Embedded Servers, Part I
You may have noticed in the last few weeks that there are more Embedded servers being certified with VMware vSphere and showing up on the VMware hardware compatibility guide for servers.  This is the result of a multiyear program by the VMware engineering team to more broadly enable processors, chipsets, and I/O devices within vSphere while still ensuring the robustness and reliability required by enterprise data centers and the cloud in general. This matters because it gives our customers more options in selecting the right server for their IT solutions. Or put another way, it allows our customers to worry even less about the platforms running their workloads in the cloud.

VMware vCloud Blog: 5 Key Features of vCloud Integration Manager
The adoption of VMware vCloud services by service providers (and customers) is growing. In fact, there has been a 3x increase just since Q3 2011, with over 100 VMware service provider partners now offering VMware vCloud Powered services. With more signing up every day, service providers want to get vSphere, vCenter, vCloud Director, vShield, and Chargeback up and running as quickly as possible. The faster that they can get these pieces up and configured, the faster they can start providing cloud infrastructure to customers.

VMWARE TV BLOG
VMwareTV: A New Way to Work in the Post-PC Era with VMware
bit.ly -- The Post-PC era is transforming the way we work. We need secure and mobile access to applications and data on the device of our choice for maximum productivity. See how VMware End-User Computing Platform transforms the way you can do business today with VMware View, Horizon Application Manager, Zimbra, Socialcast, Project Octopus, and Project AppBlast. Start your transformation today with VMware View and start your free trial today: bit.ly


VMwareTV: HCL: VMware vFabric's role in Integration, Migration, and Clouds
bit.ly -- In this video, Kiran Somalwar, VP of Enterprise Transformation Services Group at HCL, discusses VMware vFabric. HCL has 90000 employees and a large chunk of revenue comes from infrastructure management and application development and maintenance. They have chosen to partner with VMware in both the VMware vCloud and VMware vFabric spaces. Since a large focus of their work is in Java, five years ago they standardized on Spring as a development framework. Since then they have also recognized how VMware vFabric has strong capabilities in data management, integration and more. Importantly, they see how VMware vFabric's lightweight footprints are efficient, elastic, and scalable. They have worked with customers on a wide range of VMware vFabric solutions such as a migration from heavyweight to lightweight infrastructure. As well, they have done work to integrate custom and packaged applications throughout the enterprise, migrate legacy mainframe code, and drive significant cost savings in both hardware and software categories. They are asked by customers to help them get ready for the cloud, and vFabric helps.

VMwareTV: VMware vFabric Cloud Application Platform
bit.ly - Build, Scale and Run Data-Intensive Applications On-Premise or in the Cloud. Learn about the VMware vFabric Cloud Application Platform.

CLOUD APPLICATION PLATFORM
Cloud Foundry Improves Support For Background Processing
Cloud Foundry has significantly enhanced support for worker applications that perform background processing by allowing applications to run on CloudFoundry.com without the application container. Cloud Foundry applications are no longer limited to Web applications that respond to HTTP requests. Instead, they can be run as executable or “standalone” applications. A standalone application is one that does not require a provided framework or container.

Running Resque Workers on Cloud Foundry
We introduced Cloud Foundry’s new “standalone” applications feature in the first post in this four-part series. In this second installment, we will look at the most common use of a standalone application–the worker process. Workers can be used for all kinds of asynchronous background jobs, such as updating search indexes, emailing all users with a password reset approaching, performing a database backup to persistent storage, or uploading new customer data from external storage. In this post, we will walk through an example of deploying workers to Cloud Foundry using Resque.

Running Workers on Cloud Foundry with Spring
In the two previous posts in this series, we discussed using Cloud Foundry’s new support for standalone apps to deploy worker processes. We looked at an example using Resque for Ruby apps. In this third installment, we explore using Spring to create workers in Java apps.
Let’s walk through an example.
Deploying the Cloud Foundry Twitter Search Sample
Cloud Foundry Twitter Search includes two applications: a standalone Java application that periodically polls Twitter for tweets containing the word “cloud” and a Node.js web application that displays the results. The applications communicate via a shared RabbitMQ service. The worker publishes tweet information to a RabbitMQ exchange, and the web application consumes the tweets and pushes them to the browser using SockJS.

Spring MVC 3.2 Preview: Introducing Servlet 3, Async Support
Overview Spring MVC 3.2 M1 will introduce asynchronous request processing support based on Servlet 3.0. This is the first of several blog posts covering the new feature, providing along the way sufficient background and context to understand how and why you might want to take advantage of it. A major goal of any milestone release Read more...

Spring MVC 3.2 Preview: Techniques for Real-time Updates
In my last post I introduced the new Servlet 3, async support feature in Spring MVC 3.2 M1 in the context of long-running requests. A second very important motivation for async processing is the need for browsers to receive real-time updates. Examples include chatting in a browser, stock quotes, status updates, live sports results, and Read more...

Using Cloud Foundry Workers with Spring
You've no doubt read Jennifer Hickey's amazing blog posts introducing Cloud Foundry workers, their application in setting up Ruby Resque background jobs, and today's post introducing the Spring support. Key Takeaways for Spring Developers You need to update your version of vmc with gem update vmc. Cloud Foundry workers let you run public static void Read more...

EXTERNAL VMWARE RELATED BLOGS (vExperts/Guest Bloggers)
VMware Octopus in Beta
The beta of VMware Octopus has been announced.
For those of you who don’t know what is VMware Octopus, you can head to this video published by at YouTube to get closer look what Octopus is and how it will work.
I have blogged about Octopus when VMware has announced the project during VMworld 2011 last year. You can read my detailed article here.

Zimbra 7.2 Collaboration Server Release
New Zimbra Collaboration Server 7.2 has been announced by VMware.
Zimbra is heading slowly to the integration of Octopus and Mozy, but not in this 7.2 release yet. In this release there are some new features, some enhancements and bug fixes, and also some major system updates on which I would like to report too.
With smaller footprint than Exchange 2010 and seamless integration with integrated Zimbra Outlook Connector, which has been completely rewamped, Zimbra is getting better with every release.

How too many vCPUs can negatively affect your performance
Customer with small vSphere environment of just two hosts had performance issues and they asked me to investigate the situation. When looking at the technical specs at first glance, you would suspect that this configuration should work. With just two hosts, each dual Quad core CPU, the enivornment had a total of 16 CPU cores. In total there were only 9 VMs running using a total of 23 vCPUs. Usually you can easily run 5 vCPUs per core, if not more.

An Unbroken Chain of Trust is of Paramount Importance
There has been a lot of coverage over the past week about Anonymous’ Hardcore Charlie releasing some old 2003/2004 code of the VMware ESX Hypervisor on the Internet. The release of the code may not cause anyone any immediate increased risk of attack. If you want to know why keep reading.

What’s New in VMware View 5.1 (Beyond Marketing)
VMware has just announced VMware View 5.1 and has also lifted the NDA. Despite being a .1 release the VMware View team added a significant number of features that improve VMware View performance, scalability and user experience.

Sizing for VMware View Storage Accelerator (CBRC)
As VMware View 5.1 launches administrators will start to trial the new View release, and in special they will test the benefits of View Storage Accelerator. This article is focused in helping administrators to properly size hosts and storage for use with CBRC.
Before reading this article I recommend the read of couple of my previous posts Understanding CBRC (Content Based Read Cache) and Understanding CBRC – RecomputeDigest Method.

vCenter Infrastructure Navigator 1.1 - What's New
VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator is an application awareness plug-in to vCenter Server, and provides continuous dependency mapping of applications. Infrastructure Navigator offers application context to the virtual infrastructure administrators to monitor and manage the virtual infrastructure inventory objects and actions. Administrators can use Infrastructure Navigator to understand the impact of change on the virtual environment in their application infrastructure. Infrastructure Navigator helps virtual infrastructure administrators perform the following tasks:

The VMware Reference Architecture for Stateless Virtual Desktops on Local Solid-State Storage with VMware View 5
This document provides the reference architecture for Stateless Virtual Desktops with VMware View 5 on local solid-state storage. A stateless desktop architecture is ideally suited for standard desktop environments where the desktop image is consistent from user to user; however with proper application design can be used in broad use cases.

New Book - VMware View 5: Building a Successful Virtual Desktop
Discover the powerful and cost saving new virtualization opportunities on the client side with VMware View 5! In VMware View 5: Building a Successful Virtual Desktop, leading virtualization consultant Paul O 'Doherty teaches the essentials of View, bringing together critical information, deep insights, and best practices drawn from his extensive experience deploying virtual desktop technology in many of today 's most demanding business environments. O' Doherty walks through every step of View, from the earliest planning phases through configuration, implementation, and management. He illuminates crucial considerations ranging from changes to end-user experience and support considerations through performance management. Readers will learn how to plan and smoothly stage virtual desktop infrastructure deployments, and avoid pitfalls associated with latency, scalability, storage, and networking. Using this book s' proven techniques, virtualization professionals can achieve the full promise of virtualized desktops, dramatically improving system administration productivity while building environments that are more flexible and easier to manage.

VSPEX Fun
On April 12 EMC announced a new effort to deliver infrastructure proven solutions through our partners. The brand name for these solutions is VSPEX. The VSPEX team has already published all kinds of great material on EMC’s VSPEX community.
The EMC Channel team here in Singapore is bringing the VSPEX word to all of our partners throughout Asia Pacific and Japan. Our Cisco channel manager asked me to create a video she could use with Cisco to tell them more about the project. She told me to keep it brief–under 30 seconds–and have some fun with it.

VMware Press Launches Sweepstakes!
Now this may not be of interest to everybody  but VMware Press, the official publisher of VMware books and training materials, has launched a 60 day Facebook sweepstakes beginning today the May 1 and running through to June 30th. The Prize offerings include a $100 Amazon gift card and three VMware Press books of the winner’s choice; the nine second prize winners will win an eBook of their choice. Good luck – enter now!
http://ow.ly/aBkvE

vSphere 5 AutoLab
It’s Alastair here, today I am very pleased to release the vSphere 5 AutoLab, a free tool for the VMware community.
What is the AutoLab?
The AutoLab is a quick easy way to build a vSphere environment for testing and learning using a single desktop or laptop PC and VMware Workstation, Fusion or ESXi. The whole lab runs in VMs on that one PC, even ESXi runs in a VM and can then run it’s own VMs.

Goodbye VMware PSO – Hello VMware EUC Global CoE!
Now that yesterdays VMware EUC announcement hysteria has subsided, I thought this would be a good time to make my own VMware EUC announcement. (For those of you who were under a rock yesterday, here is my favorite post talking about What's new in View 5.1 (Beyond Marketing).
After nearly two years of delivering customer projects with VMware Profesional Services (PSO), I have been given the opportunity to join VMware's EUC Global Center of Excellence (CoE). This is a move I am really excited about.

3 CPUs and 12GB RAM is the New Tier-1 App
In what can only be regarded as a breakthrough in hypervisor performance technology, it is now possible to run tier-1 applications on minimal resources and without regard for high-availability of any kind!
A fascinating new report from Enterprise Strategy Group reveals that one particular hypervisor is suddenly capable of running tier-1 applications on just 3 virtual CPUs and a mere 12GB RAM — power and efficiency at its finest.  Not only that, the New Tier-1 App no longer requires application-level clustering to meet stringent SLAs!  Simply throw your mission-critical SQL Server database on a stand-alone hypervisor and skip the shared block storage entirely — you just don’t need it anymore.

ImageBuilder Deep Dive, Part 1: Building your own customized ESXi ISO
I know that my ESXi-Customizer script has gotten some popularity and a lot of people use it for merging community developed or commercial third-party hardware drivers into the ESXi installation ISO. It has some limitations though - some of you might have stumbled over them already, at least I have described them in the "Known issues" section. Probably the worst is the fact that it cannot handle

ImageBuilder Deep Dive, Part 2: A closer look and advanced functions
In the first part of this Image Builder Deep Dive I introduced a script that you can use to build your own customized installation ISO and can easily be adapted to your own needs. In this second part we will take a closer look at the basic cmdlets we used and get to know some more cmdlets with advanced functionality. To make best use of the following explanations I suggest that you load the

With vSphere 5.0 and HA can I share datastores across clusters?
I have had this question multiple times by now so I figured I would write a short blog post about it. The question is if you can share datastores across clusters with vSphere 5.0 and HA enabled. This question comes from the fact that HA has a new feature called “datastore heartbeating” and uses the datastore as a communication mechanism.

Problems using the vCenter Web Client
I was doing some upgrades in my lab and ran in to an issue. Whenever I started the vCenter Web Client I got a message that the vCenter Inventory Service wasn’t running. I looked at my Services section in Windows 2008 and found that it wasn’t started. Starting it gave me a new error: 1067. This is very generic but I figured I would google it anyway. That actually brought me to our own documentation, yes I should check that first next time, and it mentioned I could reset the inventory service as follows:

VMWARE KB ARTICLES
VMware Knowledge Base Weekly Digest: New Articles Published for Week Ending 5/5/12
My VMware
Unable To Remove Users Completely From The Account (2019104)
Socialcast
How to decline or ignore invites to a group in Socialcast (2019339)
VMware ESX
Failover mode changes from 4 to 1 automatically with EMC storage arrays on ESX/ESXi 4.x (2018802)
EMC CX and VNX Firmware and ESX requirements for vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) support (2008822)
VMware Player
VMware Security Patches Upgrade Guide (2019941)
VMware Service Manager
Selecting Close FCB or Service Resumed on a call shows an incorrect message in the history (2005993)
When upgrading from Service Manager 8.x to 9.x, the Oracle database reports the error: exact fetch returns more than requested number of rows (2018425)
Logon in VSM 9.x is not evaluating new login info entered when Single Sign On (SSO) is enabled  (2019835)
Vmware Service Manager displaying incorrect event times in the notification audit log (2019946)
Error occurs when re-running a full upgrade on a database that is already on version 9.1 in VMware Service Manager (2020009)
The Service Manager call reopened by an incoming email is assigned to the incorrect person (2020010)
CMDB items are not returned in searches after upgrading from VSM 8.x to VSM 9.x (1031895)
QD dropdowns in VSM display "Attribute 1" instead of the new name assigned in Admin System Titles (2005340)
Request data changes after request closure (2015735)
Delay tasks do not calculate the delay time using working hours (2019995)
VMware vCenter Configuration Manager
Deploying Oracle JRE updates via vCM fails with the error: Could not download: update_name (2019917)
VMware vCenter Orchestrator
AD Workflows that run simultaneously fail with the error: No 'variable' named 'X' found (2019996)
VMware vCenter Server
vCenter 4.1 and 5.0 Update Manager check new notifications task continually fails (2008266)
Logging in to vCenter Server in linked mode using the vSphere Web Client fails with the error: Unable to connect to vCenter Inventory Service on xxxxxxxx (2019346)
Cannot umount the datastore after migrating the virtual machines (2019728)
Installing VMware Tools on Solaris 10 fails (2019932)
VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager
Collecting the vSphere Replication VRMS and VR server logs manually (2013091)
VMware vFabric AppInsight
Application in VMware vFabric AppInsight will not start (2019336)
VMware vFabric Hyperic Server
Unable to install vFabric Hyperic license key because the /etc/opt/vmware/vfabric/ directory does not exist (2019330)
VMware View Manager
After upgrading View Connection Server, a blank grey web page is displayed for the View Administrator console (2018751)
VMware View Persona Management fails and data does not sync (2019247)
VMware View Transfer Server fails to publish Local Mode image (2019448)
VMware vSphere Update Manager
Upgrading Nexus 1000V VEMs fails with a SystemError Exception in vCenter Server when using VMware Update Manager (2019533)
VMware Workstation
Downgrading from VMware Workstation 8 to VMware Workstation 7 (2019528)
Troubleshooting network connectivity issues in VMware Workstation (2019836)
Defragmenting and shrinking Workstation virtual machine disks (2019649)
Connecting an external hard drive to a Workstation virtual machine (2019644)
ZCA Zimbra Appliance
Bind Zimbra LDAP to multiple Ethernet interfaces (2014543)
ZCS Network Edition
Zimbra domain level Free/Busy Interop settings for Exchange not functional (2019761)

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Here's a tip for copying ESXi VMs.  Before making a copy, log in to the source VM and execute the following command:

 

# esxcfg-advcfg -s 1 /Net/FollowHardwareMac

 

With this setting, the management interface MAC address will update whenever the VM's MAC address changes.  Without this setting, you may end up with multiple VMs sharing the same management interface MAC address.

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