Location:
Board room FC-30 in the food courtPlace De ville Tower C330 Sparks St.Ottawa Ont.K1A 0N5

Presentations:
1- Stephane Robinson (Health Canada) – The Evolution of virtualization at Health Canada

2- Teradici – Desktop virtualization with PC-over-IP - PC-over-IP
technology allows enterprise PCs and workstations to be centrally
managed in a data center while providing high resolution, full frame
rate 3D graphics and HD media, with full USB peripheral
interoperability, locally over a LAN or remotely over a high-latency
WAN. PC-over-IP is an innovative display protocol technology that
enables the practical consolidation of all IT resources into a data
center, eliminates the need for desktop workstations, PCs and thin
clients, and delivers an uncompromised user experience to each desk,
anywhere, without incurring the security risks associated with
transmitting data across a network or having data reside in remote PCs.

3- Cisco – Networking Best Practices in a virtual environment (3.5 and vSphere 4)

Registration: http://campaign.vmware.com/usergroup/ug-signup.php?session=Ottawa

Posted by Gabriel Maciel

"The configuration described in this article is very generic, outlining how you can boot the ESX Server 3i version 3.5 Update 4 Installable image using PXE. The description provided outlines how you can boot from the network by PXE booting ESX Server 3i version 3.5 Update 4 Installable. This installation is completely stateless (it does not rely on the presence of a local disk). Therefore, the installation and post-install configuration are not persistent across reboot. If you want to automate the sever configuration at boot time, use the VMware Infrastructure Toolkit (VMware Infrastructure SDK). See the following page for links to VMware documentation related to SDKs: http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/sdk_pubs.html."

More information here and here.

Posted by Gabriel Maciel

VM Monitor

Get X-Ray Insight into Your ESX Servers:

• Quickly check the health of your VMware ESX Server

• View detailed virtual machine health statistics

• Get visual alerts when performance degradation occurs

FREE Real-time NetFlow Analyzer

This free desktop tool captures and analyzes NetFlow data so that you can:

• Quickly answer "why's the network so slow?"

• Identify network top talkers

• Analyze traffic spikes and bandwidth consumption

Exchange Monitor

Continuously monitor Microsoft® Exchange health, including:

• Exchange services

• Mail queues

• Host server health

Award Winning TFTP Server

The most robust, widely trusted and easy-to-use TFTP server which enables you to:

• Concurrently upload and download images from multiple devices

• Upload and download configurations to devices

• Transfer files larger than 32MB

Advanced Subnet Calculator

Compute addresses for IP subnets with ease and perform other tasks with:

• Forward and reverse DNS resolution

• CIDR calculator

• Ability to geneate a list of addresses for any subnet

Posted by Gabriel Maciel

Trilead VM Explorer is a management tool that eases management, backup and disaster recovery tasks in your VMware ESX Server environment. You get maximum flexibility: backups can be stored to ESX, Windows, Linux and FreeBSD based storage platforms or directly to a SAN.

Features:

• Multi-Server Management: The graphical user interface of VM Explorer allows to connect to multiple ESX, Linux and FreeBSD servers at the same time in the same interface.


• Server to Server fast copy: Allows you to copy files directly (drag&drop) between ESX, Linux and FreeBSD servers at full speed: throughput is only limited by the available network/storage system bandwidth.


• ESX to ESX/Windows/Linux/FreeBSD/SAN Backup & Restore: Our unique ESX to any backup feature allows to backup virtual machines to other ESX Servers, Linux or FreeBSD servers. Of course, virtual machines can also be stored to a SAN (ISCSI or NFS) directly attached to an ESX. Furthermore, backups can also be saved on the Windows machine where the VM Explorer is running.


• Support for ESX 3i: VMX version 1.5 includes beta support for the next generation of ESX servers.


• File Browser: Browse instantly your ESX/Linux/FreeBSD servers' file system and copy files from one to the other just by drag & drop. Supports also up- and download to the management station.


• Integrated SSH Client: The integrated SSH Terminal Client allows you to configure all your Unix/Linux based Servers trough SSH, all within one software.


• Job Scheduler: The integrated job scheduler allows you to perform unattended, periodic backups of your virtual infrastructure.


• Integrated ESX Snapshot Manager: Create and remove snapshots directly from within VMX.


• Dynamic Compression: To make use of slow network links (e.g., for wide-area replication) or to save space on the target system, backups can be dynamically compressed.

• Screenshots


• Editions


• Download

Here you have the 3 must read articles from VMwarewolf about VMware Infrastructure troubleshooting:

1. Common Network issues in VMware Infrastructure


2. Common System Management issues in VMware Infrastructure


3. Common Licensing issues in VMware Infrastructure

"Resolution Paths are collections of modular steps that can be used to solve tech support issues.  Being modular, they can be re-used in other paths. A good example is using the ping command to test network connectivity.  This step is used in all kinds of troubleshooting procedures. Put a number of these steps together, and you have a method...Down the left side in yellow are common problems we get calls on. To the right of each problem are the steps you would take to resolve the problem. I have included hyperlinks to help get you to the answers fast."

The VMware Infrastructure Management Assistant (VIMA) allows administrators and developers to run scripts and agents to manage ESX and ESXi systems. VIMA is a virtual machine that includes prepackaged software, a logging component, and an authentication component that supports non-interactive login. You can use VIMA to perform most of the tasks commonly performed in the ESX service console.

You can download the appliance here.

Posted by Gabriel Maciel

SolarWinds free VM Monitor is an ingenious desktop tool that continuously monitors a VMware® ESX Server and its virtual machines, delivering the real-time virtualization monitoring that you’ve been missing. With VM Monitor at your fingertips, you’ll be able to track virtualization health at-a-glance and ensure your mission-critical apps never fail you. Go ahead, declare victory in the virtualization game and impress your boss and your fellow IT administrators with your newfound X-ray vision into ESX Servers!

SolarWinds free VM Monitor makes it easy to:

• Quickly check the health of your VMware ESX Server by monitoring CPU, memory utilization, number of virtual machines configured and running, and much more


• View detailed individual virtual machine health statistics including VM name, guest OS, and VM state, as well as processor, memory, and network usage


• Leverage best practice thresholds to begin monitoring virtualized servers right out-of-the-box


• Prevent performance degradation by watching threshold-specific indicators to visually alert you when problems occur

Posted by Gabriel Maciel

From Scott Lowe:

• Fault-Tolerant VMs in VI: Operations and Best Practices

From VM /ETC:

• Virtual Center Directions

From Colin McNamara:

• Cisco releases Nexus 1000v virtual switch for VMware

Enjoy!

Posted by Gabriel Maciel