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)
From the editors Virtual Desk VMware vSphere: Design Workshop [V5.0] This is the first and only official guide to VMware's new VCP510 (VCP 5) exam. Organized to follow VMware's newest exam blueprint, it's also designed from the ground up to be both engaging and enjoyable. Author Bill Ferguson acts like a "study buddy," encouraging virtualization professionals, anticipating their questions, and helping them gain both mastery and confidence. VCP 5 Promo (Australia) Be among the first to earn the newest VMware certification - VCP5 The launch of vSphere 5 comes with nearly 200 new and enhanced capabilities, and will continue to set the standard in virtualization and cloud computing, delivering better application performance and availability for all business-critical applications. Therefore it is important for you and your organization to be equipped with the latest knowledge and skills needed to operate your virtual environment. Contact your TAM for more information. 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 Beta Classes Be among the first to take new courses designed and delivered by VMware Training by participating in our beta classes. They cost less, count for full credit and give you the chance to contribute to the final course content. Learn more. VMWARE OFFICIAL BLOGS AND NEWS vCO Team: VMware Virtual Customer Labs Automated with vCenter Orchestrator The virtual Insanity blog has a good article describing the VMware virtual Customer Lab (vCL) consisting in a fully automated cloud solution where users can checkout VMware software solutions for 14 days of testing and training/education. The article explains what is the vCL and how it works. A part of the solution involves a vCO powered request / approval portal. Read more about it here. VMware vSphere Blog: Migrating RDMs, and a question for RDM Users. On a number of occasions recently, I had to investigate what happened to a Raw Device Mapping (RDM) when: The VM to which the RDM was attached was Storage vMotion'ed (VM Powered On) The VM to which the RDM was attached was Cold Migrated (VM Powered Off) Some of you may even have been following along the comments in some of my previous postings. Well, this is what I observed, testing with both pRDMs and vRDMs. vSphere PowerCLI Blog: PowerCLI 5.0.1 vCloud Director – Stopping and starting vApps In a previous video we showed you how to get started with PowerCLI 5.0.1 and specifically the vCloud Director (vCD) cmdlets, we show you how to gain a list of cmdlets which were added to PowerCLI 5.0.1 for managing vCD and how to use some of these cmdlets to gather data from your vCD infrastructure. VMware vSphere Blog: Introduction to the vSphere API Part 1 In our previous article, we quickly looked at the differences between an API and an SDK. In this article, we will take a look at a high level summary of what makes up the vSphere API. Overview The vSphere API provides an interface for users to access the capabilities and features of the vSphere platform which includes the vCenter Server and ESX(i) hosts. Capabilities such as host management, virtual machine provisioning, monitoring, etc. are exposed as a Web Services API from both a vCenter Server and ESX(i) host. Depending on the feature, certain functionalities of the API will only be available at the vCenter Server (e.g. VM Cloning or Storage DRS). VMware vSphere Blog: The vCloud Director Appliance Evaluating software to make sure that it is fit for purpose in your environment can be a time consuming task. One has to acquire the hardware, get the software, and configure the environment. Only then can they get to the business of performing the evaluation. Of course, virtualization helps here. Just a quick look at the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace and you’ll see hundreds of pre-packaged solutions ready for you to download and play with. VMware End User Computing: Antivirus Scanning in a VMware View Virtual Desktop Environment That Includes ThinApp Virtualized Applications When you have ThinApp virtualized applications installed in a VMware View virtual desktop environment, what do you need to do to set up antivirus protection? You may think that ThinApp virtualized applications protect the desktop from viruses and other malware during application use because of the “virtual bubble” created for user activity. Yes, the ThinApp “virtual bubble” can offer a layer of protection against runtime modifications to files and registry keys. But running ThinApp virtualized applications is similar to running native applications on the desktop: you need to protect the desktop. VMTN Blog: Join the VMware Community Circle on Google+ You probably have heard about Google+, but most people haven't really checked out this new social network. Google+ has some of the good qualities of both Twitter and Facebook, and it could turn out to be quite a nice way for IT professionals interested in VMware, virtualization, cloud computing, and IT transformation to hang out. Google+ has some of the nicer qualities of Twitter, in that you can follow your interest graph, not your social graph. If you're reading this blog, that means you can follow fellow IT professionals and talk about jumbo frames without Aunt Helga asking how you're going to attach them to the wall. VMware vSphere Blog: DRS VM-Host Affinity "must-rules" remain active after disabling DRS Frank Denneman, Senior Technical Marketing Architect, VMware vSphere 4.1 and vSphere 5 offer the ability to create virtual machine to host affinity rules. A VM-Host affinity rule specifies an affinity relationship between a group of virtual machines and a group of hosts. There are 'mandatory' rules (designated by "must") and 'preferential' rules (designated by "should".) Rethink IT: vCloud Integration Manager and more clouds in more countries Today, VMware is announcing new software designed specifically for our service provider partners called vCloud Integration Manager. We developed Integration Manager to provide a simple and standardized way for service providers to provision vCloud Director, vShield and vSphere in order to more quickly get new customers up and running on a cloud service. Until now, service providers either had to do these tasks manually, or redirect valuable software development resources to writing undifferentiated "glue code" and/or automation scripts. VMware for Small-Medium Business Blog: Introducing vCenter Protect (Shavlik Technologies acquisition) VMware and Shavlik Technologies have been partners for years and decided to officially tie the knot in 2011. vCenter Protect (formerly Shavlik NetChk Protect) complements vSphere perfectly and helps medium and smaller organizations to manage the transition from physical to virtual. With vCenter Protect, we are transforming IT solutions to enable IT generalists to take advantage of the efficiencies gained with the latest technologies, while using a simplified, easy-to-use IT Management solution at an affordable price. Business Critical Applications: Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery for Organizations of All Sizes Whether you’re a large enterprise or small to midsized business, VMware solutions enable you to reduce costs and simplify your plans for business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR). For customer sites with up to 75 virtual machines: Save 40 percent off a 75-VM pack of VMware Site Recovery Manager™ Standard and vCenter Operations™ Enterprise. For customer sites with more than 75 virtual machines: Introducing the Business Production Bundle, a 75-VM pack of Site Recovery Manager Enterprise, vCenter Operations Enterprise, and VMware vShield App. Purchase it now and receive 75 free Training Credits (value $7,500 USD). Training can be instructor-led or webbased and expires after one year. VMware vSphere Blog: Using HP’s Online VIB Repository I just learned about the online VIB repository that HP has made available at http://vibsdepot.hp.com. This is a great resource and I thought I would give a quick overview on how you can access this repository to browse the contents and add the VIBs to your Image Profiles. VMware vSphere Blog: The Importance of VM Size to NUMA Node Size vSphere is pretty smart when it comes to managing physical memory and determining where best to place a virtual machine’s memory given how busy each NUMA node is in the physical server. If a VM is running in a busy NUMA node, the ESXi kernel will automatically migrate the virtual machine to a less busy NUMA node in the server in order to get better performance. VMware vSphere Blog: The vCloud Director Adapter It’s amazing how quickly the resources in your IaaS implementation will get consumed. Leveraging the vCloud Director catalog and vApp template features, users don’t have to deal with the tedious activities associated with standing up new environments. This ease of use facilitates the consumption of resources. vCenter Orchestrator Blog: Configuration Elements revisited A configuration element is a list of attributes you can use to configure constants across a whole Orchestrator server deployment. That’s what the vCO documentation states. In other words, the configuration elements are the easiest way offered by vCO to organize and establish a set of constant values which will be accessible from any key element of vCO (workflows, policies and web views). VMware vSphere Blog: Storage DRS affinity rules and alternate swapfile location By default Storage DRS applies an Intra-VM affinity rule to each virtual machine. This default rule is commonly referred to as the VMDK affinity rule. The Intra-VM affinity rule keeps the files belonging to a virtual machine, such as the VMX file, Swap files and VMDK files together on the same datastore. If a virtual machine is migrated out of a datastore, all files will be migrated. VMWARE TV BLOG SPRINGSOURCE Cloud Foundry Now Supports the Rails Console Ruby and Rails developers can now remotely access the popular rails console using the Cloud Foundry command line tool (VMC). This new feature enables inspection of the Cloud Foundry Runtime App environment, troubleshooting application issues in runtime, and even the ability to modify data “on the fly” for one-off admin tasks. Using the new vmc rails-console command, developers can target any Cloud Foundry instance, including the upcoming release of Micro Cloud Foundry. Getting Started First, install or update your Cloud Foundry command line tool (‘VMC’) to the latest preview version using the following command: gem install vmc --pre You can verify that you got the right version using: vmc -v which should show the version to be 0.3.16.beta.3 or higher. Next, push or update a Rails app using vmc push. To access the console, run: vmc rails-console appname That’s all there is to it! Read on for a more detailed example… EXTERNAL VMWARE RELATED BLOGS (vExperts/Guest Bloggers) The Trouble with CA SSL Certificates and ESXi 5 For those of you that follow me on Twitter you’ll know that I’ve been having some fun this week with changing out the default VMware generated SSL certificates on a greenfields deployment of vSphere 5 that will be supporting a large public cloud. Changing certificates is nothing new, and in environments that are concerned with security it is common practice. However it has been my experience that changing certificates with ESX(i) and vCenter has always been a bit of a challenge (I have done it on vSphere 4.x before this). It can be very time consuming and error prone, especially if you haven’t done it before. One of the things that makes it hard for people to get this right is that there is no one document or source of truth that explains in sufficient detail what the requirements and supported configurations are or how to implement CA signed ssl certificates in ESX(i) and vCenter Server. This has tripped up many organizations both large and small. I’m hoping that the information in this article will help and encourage more people to change out the default certs (to improve security), and make the process far more reliable and easier to achieve with vSphere 5. This article will focus on successfully changing the default VMware SSL certificates on ESXi 5 hosts with CA signed certificates using a Microsoft CA (it will also work with public and OpenSSL CAs, but I have not tested it yet). How-to disable ssh for the host has been enabled message in ESXi 5 SSH for the host has been enabled – how to disable this message. The other day when I updated my very old article on How to activate SSH on ESXi, I thought that I have posted already an article on the deactivation of the ssh for the host has been enabled warning message in vSphere 5. But I didn’t. You could already find it on VMware communities or VMware KB articles, but this is also for my own bookmarking …. -:). Is Lockdown Mode Really Locked Down? I read a good blog article recently about a caveat with SSH keys and Lockdown Mode in ESXi 5 by William Lam at virtuallyGhetto. Now that SSH keys are fully supported in ESXi 5, and this will allow an authorized user to continue to log into the host even when Lockdown Mode is enabled, is Lockdown Mode really locked down enough? Unofficial VMware View PCoIP Adapter for VCOps VMware View adapter for vCenter Operations is close to GA date. That’s is fantastic; and it will give VMware View administrators the long waited insight on what’s happening with the virtual desktops and virtual desktop infrastructure. VMware Goodies – Free Posters to download vSphere ESXi 5 free poster Two Free posters from VMware. In case that you did not see the information elsewhere there is a great 2 PDF posters to download from VMware. There is a Power CLI 5.0 poster and also VMware ESXi 5 Reference poster. Both are delivered as a PDFs. QUADStor delivers Storage Virtualization and VAAI - for free! Are you a VMware ESXi small business (or even home) user and do you enviously look at Enterprise and high budget customers who can afford fancy high performance SAN boxes with storage virtualization features and VAAI support? Stop being envious and have a look at QUADstor's storage virtualization software. It is currently in beta and offered for free. And it has all the features that are normally How cool and useful is Storage DRS?! I was just playing around in my lab and created a whole bunch of VMs when I needed to deploy to large virtual machines. Both of them had 500GB disks. The first one deployed without a hassle, but the second one was impossible to deploy, well not impossible for Storage DRS. Just imagine you had to figure this out yourself! Frank wrote a great article about the logic behind this and there is no reason for me to repeat this, just head over to Frank’s blog if you want to know more.. Technical Whitepaper - VMware vSphere Distributed Switch Best Practices This paper provides best practice guidelines for deploying the VMware vSphere® distributed switch (VDS) in a vSphere environment. The advanced capabilities of VDS provide network administrators with more control of and visibility into their virtual network infrastructure. This document covers the di!erent considerations that vSphere and network administrators must take into account when designing the network with VDS. It also discusses some standard best practices for configuring VDS features. Technical Whitepaper - VMware vSphere VMFS-5 Upgrade Considerations VMware vSphere 5.0 introduced a new version of the flagship vSphere Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) known as VMFS-5. VMFS-5 offers a variety of new features, including: • Larger single extent volume (64TB) • Larger Virtual Machine Disks (VMDKs): 2TB – 512 bytes with a new unified 1MB block size • More and smaller sub-blocks (8KB) to reduce the amount of stranded/unused space • Improvements in performance and scalability via the implementation of the vSphere vStorage API for Array Integration (VAAI) primitive ATS (Atomic Test & Set) across all datastore operations. Setting the default affinity rule for Storage DRS On my blog article for yesterday “Rob M” commented that the default affinity rule for Storage DRS (SDRS), keep VM files together, did not make sense to him. One of the reasons this affinity rule is set is because customers indicated that from an operational perspective it would be easier if all files of a given VM (vmx / vmdk’s) would reside in the same folder. Especially troubleshooting was one of the main reasons, as this lowers complexity. I have to say that I fully agree with this, I’ve been in the situation where I needed to recover virtual machines and having them spread across multiple datastore really complicates things. TCP and UDP ports used in VMware’s products TCP and UDP ports which are used and should be modified for each product. I found an interesting KB article, which shows you all ports required for all VMware Products. If you dealing with firewalls for local/remote sites, and using VMware Products, this KB might be helpfull since it groups all the products and different ports required to be opened. The long list of products and especially the list of ports is quite impressive… Technical Whitepaper - Scalable Cloud Network with Cisco Nexus 1000V Series Switches and VXLAN Many customers are building private or public clouds. Intrinsic to cloud computing is having multiple tenants with numerous applications using the cloud infrastructure. Each of these tenants and applications needs to be logically isolated from each other, even at the networking level. For example, a three-tier application can have multiple virtual machines requiring logically isolated networks between the virtual machines. Using a CNAME (DNS alias) to mount an NFS datastore I was playing around in my lab with NFS datastores today. I wanted to fail-over a replicated NFS datastore without the need to re-register the virtual machines running on them. I had mounted the NFS datastore using the IP address and as that is used to create the UUID it was obvious that it wouldn’t work. I figured there should be a way around it but after a quick search on the internet I still hadn’t found anything yet. How to get VMware View Desktop Login Count I was reading tweets today and someone asked for a way to retrieve how often desktops are used – how many times users log into virtual desktops. I am not sure the reason behind the request but this is possible via the VMware View PowerCLI command Get-EventReport. Get-EventReport -viewName user_events | Where {$_.eventtype -eq "AGENT_CONNECTED"} | Group-Object machineid | Format-Table * The problem with Get-EventReport is that the output is the machineid property, not allowing administrator to identify the virtual desktops. Distributed vSwitches and vCenter outage, what’s the deal? Recently my colleague Venky Deshpande released a whitepaper around VDS Best Practices. This white paper describes various architectural options when adopting a VDS only strategy. A strategy of which I can see the benefits. On Facebook multiple people made comments around why this would be a bad practice instead of a best practice, here are some of the comments: vCheck 6.0 released One of the most popular scripts on my site with 26,966 downloads of v5 has been the vCheck script, for those of you who haven’t seen this yet here is a quick summary of this script: Summary vCheck is a vCenter checking script, the script is designed to run as a scheduled task before you get into the office to present you with key information via an email directly to your inbox in a nice easily readable format. How-to determine the number of vCPU’s to allocate to virtual machines How many vCPU’s to allocate to virtual machines? When creating new VM, one of the first questions is “how many vCPU’s to allocate to virtual machine”…. When you start an assistant in VMware vSphere and start to create a new VM, it will pick up the “right” elements depending on the template which you’ll choose from the drop down box. The correct hdd controler, network card type, etc etc… But the values about the vCPU are the not always the best to fit your environment. Reminder: Keep an eye on your vCenter SQL DB Past two months I’ve received three calls from customers who’s vCenter suddenly stopped working because their SQL database had stopped because the logs had filled up. Turns out few people regularly check the status of their SQL database. VMware has written some very good KB articles on what to do when your SQL DB fills up and stops. So this blog post is only a wake-up call for you to check on your database. Fling: Auto Deploy GUI Many of you probably know the PXE Manager fling which Max Daneri created… Max has been working on something really cool, a brand new fling: Auto Deploy GUI! I had the pleasure of test driving the GUI and providing early feedback to Max when he had just started working on it and since then it has come a long way! It is a great and useful tool which I hope will at some point be part of vCenter. Once again, great work Max! I suggest that all of you check out this excellent fling and provide Max with feedback so that he can continue to develop and improve it. Stratus vCenter Uptime Appliance I noticed the term “Stratus vCenter Uptime Appliance” a couple of weeks ago but couldn’t find any details on it. It appears that Stratus has now officially announced their vCenter Uptime Appliance. The appliance is built on the company’s fault-tolerant, Intel® processor-based ftServer architecture. In short, these systems are kept in lockstep and if one fails the other one will take over. vSphere Web Client SSL Cert not updated after vCenter SSL Cert Changed I’ve had a few people ask me over the last couple of days why their vSphere Web Client SSL certificates are not being updated when they change the vCenter SSL Certificate as per my articleThe Trouble with CA SSL Certificates and vCenter 5. The normal reason for this is that the vSphere Web Client, when installed on the vCenter Server, stores it’s SSL certificates in a completely different location to that of vCenter Server. I’ve also since found out since publishing my other articles that this is true for the Inventory Service also. Why both of these services when installed on the vCenter Server don’t leverage the same SSL certificate location I’m not sure. My previous article has now been updated to include the replacement of the SSL cert for the Inventory Service, and also mentions the vSphere Web Client when installed on the same system as vCenter. VMWARE VCAP CERTIFICATION VMware Certified Advanced Professional on vSphere 4 – Datacenter Design The VCAP-DCD is directed toward IT Architects and Consulting Architects who are capable of designing VMware solutions in a multi-site, large enterprise environment. They have a deep understanding both of VMware core components and their relation to storage and networking, and also of datacenter design methodologies. They also possess knowledge of applications and physical infrastructure, as well as their relationship to the virtual infrastructure. VMware vSphere: Design Workshop [V5.x] DRBC Design - Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Fundamentals http://mylearn.vmware.com/mgrreg/courses.cfm?ui=www_edu&a=one&id_subject=20313 VMWARE KB ARTICLES Please Check http://blogs.vmware.com/kbdigest/ for the latest articles as they were not available at the time of writing. |
From the editors Virtual Desk I decided to do my VCP 5 which I completed successfully to ensue that I am able to best assist my customers. I have added some VCP 5 study links info into the newsletter which I will leave in for a while to assist you if you are planning on doing this certification. My plan for this year is to try and do the VCAP-DCD exam. I am not sure how this will go but I will be including a section on this we well over the coming weeks. I am really looking forward to this year in virtualization and I think that if we look back at last year for any indication we are in for one amazing ride in 2012. Please enjoy the newsletter and feel free to let me know if you have anything you wish to comment on, contribute or of course complain about and I will be sure to do my best to assist you. 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. VMUG Advantage is a new, exclusive offering for VMUG members around the world. Save over $1700 USD while increasing your knowledge and network. Be the first to experience this great offer. VMWARE EDUCATION VCP 5 Promo Be among the first to earn the newest VMware certification - VCP5 The launch of vSphere 5 comes with nearly 200 new and enhanced capabilities, and will continue to set the standard in virtualization and cloud computing, delivering better application performance and availability for all business-critical applications. Therefore it is important for you and your organization to be equipped with the latest knowledge and skills needed to operate your virtual environment. 1.Achieving the VCP certification confirms that you have the education needed to successfully install, deploy, scale and manage VMware vSphere environments. 2.Obtain the latest VMware certification and meet the continuous demand for VMware Certified Professionals in the industry. 3.Distinguish yourself in the market with a certification that validates your technical capabilities.
Brisbane VMware Education Courses (click to check date and availability of seats) VMware vSphere: Advanced Fast Track [V4.x] VMware vCloud: Architecting the VMware Cloud [V1.0] VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage [V5.0] VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage [V5.0] VMware View: Install, Configure, Manage [V5.0] VMware vSphere: Fast Track [V5.0] Enterprise Integration with Spring VMware vSphere: Design Workshop [V5.0] VMware vSphere: What's New [V5.0] 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 Beta Classes Be among the first to take new courses designed and delivered by VMware Training by participating in our beta classes. They cost less, count for full credit and give you the chance to contribute to the final course content. Learn more.
The Auto Deploy plug-in allows simplified and automated provisioning of physical hosts with ESXi software by interacting with Auto Deploy server. The user is able to browse rules and rule sets defined within the Auto Deploy server, configured public depots and all available host profiles within the vCenter Server that can be used. The plug-in provides a set of pre-defined workflows for Auto Deploy hosts configuration, public depots configuration, rules management, answer files management and reprovisioning of ESXi hosts. Using Auto Deploy plug-in together with vCenter Server plug-in users can benefit from pre-defines workflows by decreasing the effort and time of provisioning and reprovisioning of stateless hosts with ESXi software.
For those that have not seen this it is a handy reference for you and customers. As you know in many display areas of ESX and vCenter it only ever shows the build number or the version number but rarely the two together, this is the list that correlates the two. http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1014508
VMware Support Insider: What are we Missing? This morning while going about my duties monitoring various social media I picked up a Tweet from a customer indicating he had just gotten past a particularly nagging problem during one of his upgrades. What caught my eye being a representative of the Knowledge Management team here at VMware was the fact that he cited a blog post (not one of ours) as having the fix he needed, and as well, pointing out that his problem was not found in our Knowledgebase.
VMware vSphere Blog: Automating Datastore/Storage Device Detachment in vSphere 5 Prior to vSphere 5, unpresenting a LUN from a set of ESX(i) hosts was not the easiest of tasks, as it took several steps that included masking rules on an ESX(i) host before and after the removal of a LUN (see this KB for more information). In vSphere 5, this process has been simplified by introducing an “unmount” datastore operation and “detach” storage device operation in the vSphere Client.
VMware vSphere Blog: How much storage can I present to a Virtual Machine? This is an interesting question, and something which popped up in some recent discussions. This is nothing more than a math exercise considering that a VM can have 4 SCSI controllers and 15 devices per controller, but the numbers are still quite interesting. Let's look at what options you have. The following is true for all the Virtual SCSI Controllers that are supported on VMs at this time (LSILogic, BUSLogic & PVSCSI).
vCO Team: vCloud Director blocking tasks and notifications integration with vCO implementation You may already have seen the theory on how to extend vCloud Director capabilities with vCenter Orchestrator, you may even have completed the first steps to do it following this tutorial. What about having a complete real use case implementation example such as a vApp Approval, adding Windows VM in Active Directory ? It is now available.
By Tina de Benedictis, End User Computing, Technial Marketing In a virtual desktop environment, optimizing desktops provides users with the best performance and reduces the load on virtual machine hosts and storage. In the past, VMware has provided IT desktop administrators with scripts to optimize desktop images in a VMware View implementation. With VMware View 5, we have added a user profile management feature: View Persona Management. This feature requires that you turn on the Volume Shadow Copy service (VSS), which was disabled in p revious optimization scripts. We have enhanced the scripts in the VMware View Optimization Guide for Windows 7 so you can optimize desktops for a View 5 Persona Management implementation. Optimization scripts are now provided for desktops in a View implementation either with or without Persona Management. In addition, we provide a script to convert previously optimized Windows 7 View desktops so they are ready for Persona Management in View 5.
I've seen a few people looking at ways to optimize their disk utilization, and a few times people have looked at putting VMs onto datastores that are replicated and have VMs protected by SRM, even if they do not want or intend to protect these new VMs. This is a Very Bad Idea (tm) for a number of reasons - first of all it will create administrative burden. You'll get alerts and warnings about unprotected VMs that you'll need to address and this may cause confusion or cause people to do... unanticipated things.
VMware vSphere Blog: Understanding the Auto Deploy Components I often get asked to help clarify the different components needed to implement Auto Deploy. Auto Deploy is a little unique from other vSphere features in that it is an amalgamation of several different technologies, some that are specific to vSphere (i.e. vCenter, Host Profiles, PowerCLI) and others are not (i.e. gPXE, DHCP, TFTP).
vSphere PowerCLI Blog: PowerCLI 5.0.1 Released with vCloud Director Automation Today PowerCLI 5.0.1 has been released. Normally with a .0.1 release you will see small bug fixes and performance increases. This is the case with this release, there are indeed bug fixes and performance increases but there is also something very exciting… PowerShell Cmdlets for managing VMware’s cloud solution – VMware vCloud Director.
VMware vSphere Blog: Mike Laverick's SRM 5.0 Book Just got my hands on a copy fresh off the presses of Mike Laverick's new SRM book "Administering VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.0". This book looks great! 494 pages of detailed technical hands-on material for administering SRM 5. Some topics at a high level:
VMware vSphere Blog: vSphere 5 Wins InfoWorld's 2012 Technology of the Year Award! InfoWorld's 2012 Technology of the Year Awards were officially announced this morning. InfoWorld presents the winners in a 25-slide presentation, featuring vSphere on slide 22 (the winners are listed in alphabetical order by company). The exact link is below: InfoWorld (1.9.12): InfoWorld's 2012 Technology of the Year Award Winners, By InfoWorld Test Center
VMware vSphere Blog: How to get started with the vCloud SDKs in less than 5mins Are you interested in trying out one of our three vCloud SDKs (Java, .NET and PHP)? Check out the videos below that show you how to get started in under 5minutes! You can find additional resources by visiting each of our vCloud SDK community forums including more sample codes.
VMware vSphere Blog: Avoiding replication of swap and page When replicating VMs for recovery with SRM you may want to prevent replication of stuff like page and swap. Sometimes it's actually strongly recommended by the replication vendor, sometimes you just don't want to consume the network bandwidth it takes to replicate these non-critical systems.
VMware Global Alliances Blog: 5 Must Haves For Your Virtualization Toolbox Posted by Jeff Cato How many of you reading this have a tool box in your garage? In fact, I don't know of anyone that doesn't have one. If you have ever fixed or built something, then you were forced to get one and stock it with at least a few tools at some point in your life. The same will be true whenever your business decides to put its servers, apps and data in the Cloud. You will need certain tools to help make both the transition to and experience in the Cloud a successful one.
VMware vSphere Blog: N:1 VRMS and auto-assigning VRS with vSphere Replication Hi everyone, hope you had a good new year's! I've seen a few questions recently with regards to setting up shared-recovery with vSphere Replication and thought it'd be a good time to hit on one or two fairly straightforward ones. When setting up a many-to-one scenario with SRM and vSphere Replication, how many VRMS servers need to be set up to support the N:1 model?
VMware Support Insider: vCenter Database Pre-Upgrade Checker Released In the past, upgrading versions of VirtualCenter or vCenter Server sometimes meant a time consuming call into Tech Support because of an issue here or there related to the SQL databases that support these products.
Thanks for following our series on the Public Cloud Diaries – an ongoing project that showcases the various business situations and challenges that companies have experienced when moving to the public cloud. In our fourth installment, we’ll be sharing the stories of five companies in the Software Industry and their journey to the public cloud.
vCenter Orchestrator Blog: Seamless integration with PowerCLI and PowerShell plug-in The initial setup and main use cases of Powershell Plug-in for vCenter Orchestrator could be found in the previous post here . In addition, PowerShell plug-in being able to run any PowerShell script doesn’t need some special things to work with PowerCLI scripts. The only thing one should do is to call the “AddPsSnapin” with “VMware.VimAutomation.Core” and it would be possible to use such cmdlets and scripts.
VMware vSphere Blog: What's the difference between an API vs SDK? If you are not a developer or programmer, the term API and SDK maybe foreign words to you. If you have heard of either of these words, often times they are miss-used or used interchangeably with one or another which can cause confusion. So what is an API and SDK?
VMware Security Blog: VMware CP&C announces major content release for VCM! The VMware Center for Policy and Compliance (CP&C) is pleased to announce our latest content update for FISMA, GLBA, HIPAA, and SOX in vCenter Configuration Manager ™ (VCM). Based off DISA’s last major release, we have now updated critical compliance requirements across several verticals.
Here are the procedures for how to get a ThinApp packaged application such as Visio 2007 to work with a natively installed Outlook:
VMware End User Computing: VMware View Client Now Live on Amazon Appstore for Android! VMware View Client for Android makes it easy to access your Windows virtual desktop from your Android with the best possible user experience on a Local Area Network (LAN) or across a Wide Area Network (WAN). Now download it for free from the Amazon Appstore for Android, making it even easier to install on your Kindle Fire!
SPRINGSOURCE AND CLOUD FOUNDRY BLOG
Simplified Application Deployment With Cloud Foundry “Manifest” Today, we added a new feature to Cloud Foundry command line tool (‘VMC’) that makes it easier to automate application deployments. The new feature, called “manifests”, describe applications in human-editable manifest documents. Manifest documents can describe anything from a simple “Hello World” app to complex multi-app hierarchies with inter-application dependencies and service binding information. The manifests feature not only adds ease-of-use to VMC, it also ensures consistency and reproducibility of application deployments in Cloud Foundry.
Cloud Foundry Welcomes .NET Framework Community Contributions This week two Seattle-based companies, Tier3 and Uhuru Software, contributed .NET Framework support to the Cloud Foundry community. Cloud Foundry was designed from the outset to support multiple developer frameworks and the new .NET supports adds to community created support for Erlang, Haskell, PHP, Python and other developer frameworks. We are excited to welcome these contributors to the Cloud Foundry open source community and look forward to .NET developers joining the open platform as a service movement.
Cloud Foundry Welcomes .NET Framework Community Contributions This week two Seattle-based companies, Tier3 and Uhuru Software, contributed .NET Framework support to the Cloud Foundry community. Cloud Foundry was designed from the outset to support multiple developer frameworks and the new .NET support adds to community created support for Erlang, Haskell, PHP, Python and other developer frameworks. We are excited to welcome these contributors to the Cloud Foundry open source community and look forward to .NET developers joining the open platform as a service movement.
Spring Integration 2.1 is now GA Spring Integration 2.1 has been released! You can download it here or configure your Maven POM. This version is the result of more than one full year of work, and the team has resolved hundreds of issues since Spring Integration 2.0 was released. Interestingly, it has been 4 years and a few days since the Read more...
Spring Framework moves to GitHub Today we're happy to announce that the Spring Framework has moved to GitHub! As you've probably noticed, nearly every other Spring project has already made the move, and those that haven't will soon. Git helps us with many of the challenges of managing a large codebase like the Spring Framework, but what's most exciting isRead more...
Spring Python 1.1.1, 1.2.1, and 1.3.0.RC1 are released! Amidst the flurry of Spring releases this month, Spring Python has it's own. Versions 1.1.1 and 1.2.1 are maintenance releases that patch some bugs. Version 1.3.0.RC1 is the first release of 1.3.0. In this release we have commits from team members, and have also merged pull requests through github. If you want to make contributionsRead more...
IT Challenge: Hardware Failure, Solution: VMware vmware.com - Stop worrying about system down. Restart apps automatically with vSphere.
IT Challenge: Provisioning Apps, Solution: VMware vmware.com - Simplify your IT management. Provision apps in minutes instead of days with VMware vSphere.
IT Challenge: Demanding End Users, Solution: VMware vmware.com - Centralize end-user device management from your desktop with VMware View.
IT Challenge: Patch Management Solution: VMware vmware.com - Don't waste your time updating patches. Simplify and automate management of all machines from a single console with VMware vCenter Protect Essentials Plus.
IT Challenge: Remote Site Management Solution: VMware vmware.com - Need to be in two places at once? Automate recovery and replication of applications to remote sites with VMware Site Recovery Manager.
IT Challenge: Email Troubles, Solution: VMware vmware.com - Do you need reliable email and collaboration on a variety of devices? Get more for less with VMware Zimbra.
IT Challenge: Slow server capacity optimization, Solution: VMware vmware.com - Tired of manually optimizing server capacity? Automate server management with vCenter Operations.
EMC FibreChannel Macintosh Microsoft Vblock vCloud VMware VXLAN Welcome to Technology Short Take #19, the first Technology Short Take for 2012. Here’s this year’s first collection of links, articles, and thoughts regarding virtualization, storage, networking, and other data center technology-related topics. I hope you find something useful!
vSphere 5 vReference Card released by Forbes Guthrie vReference Card for vSphere 5 vSphere 5 vSphere Ressources vReference Card for VMware vSphere 5 has been released. Long attended vReference card for VMware vSphere by Forbes Guthries has been released. Again, Forbes did an excellent job by providing this free resource to the community. As in the past this card does concentrate many (if not all) necessary knwledge about VMware vSphere 5 and all it takes as a place are two pages. The card is available in two formats, A4 and Letter
Freenas 8.0.3 update released few days ago. In case you’re having a home lab with some shared storage, you might want to have a look at the update from FreeNAS. With this new update released few days ago, Freenas 8.0.3 brings new features and an impressive list of upgrades and fixes. The product still do not the provide multimedia features which many people waiting for. In fact, the multimedia support like Bittorrent, iTunes, and DLNA/uPNP is available in the 8.0.3, but only by modification of the config files through the CLI. The Full GUI support is on the road map in the 8.2 version.
VMware vSphere 5 in the Datacenter – new book in French vSphere 5 in the Datacenter One could translate the original title of the book like this. Since I’m not a professional translator, the results might differ…. Anyway, we can expect a very high quality book written by two EMC employees. By two high quality professionals. New book about vSphere 5 and it’s integration in the datacenter by Eric Maillé et René-Francois Mennecier.
Troubleshooting VMware vSphere 5 vDS – Video This video was done by Eric Sloof from ntpro.nl and it shows you some troubleshooting from withing distributed virtual switches. You know vDS spans across multiple ESXi hosts within your infrastructure (or lab) and that each vDS uses physical adapters as an uplinks. But to connect the correct physical NIC to the correct port will in some cases solve problems….
How vMotion Works – in details….VMworld Video I knew how vMotion worked. At least up to today. But then I discovered this video from VMware, which goes really deep with this really detailed session. And you’ll see that it’s even more amazing that you have thought before. The all video is 47 minutes long, so watch this only if you got enough time. It’s worthy. The speaker is Sreekanth Setty from VMware R&D, and Gabriel Tarasuk-Levin – VMware R&D.
How to Install Android in VMware Workstation 8 How to install latest Android in VMware Workstation 8 VMware Workstation 8 gives you the possibility to test multiple systems without installing a multiboot solution on your physical computer (server) and learn easily without breaking up your underlying system. But you still have the possibility to access to the files located on you physical machine through the VM. In my career I had many questions about VMs and accessing files, and people who are inexperienced with virtualization are often not aware that the running VM behaves like a physical computer on your local network ( LAN). That’s why in many occasions I finding myself to repeat often the same thing. I’m not sure that the people which is just starting with virtualization are aware of that.
VMware Tools version number higher than expected Today, when performing a VMware Health Check, I came across a strange issue with a customer of mine. Well, issue is maybe a big word, but I discovered the VMware Tools version some of the VMs had running, were newer than the VMware Tools version from a newly installed VM. To make sure I double checked by removing the VMware Tools and reinstalling them, again the VMware Tools version was less than the tools version of the suspicious VMs.
How to make vCenter datastore alarms useful When visiting customers I noticed that the VMware admin often doesn’t really know how much free space is left on the datastores and wether action is needed to free up space or get extra capacity. When I show them the datastore overview in the VI Client that shows the warnings and alerts for the datastores, it turns out that they don’t often look at this page because it gives too many false alarms. These false alarms happen because the default values right out of the box are set at 75% for a warning to trigger and 85% for an alarm to trigger. In most cases this is much too soon as the next image shows you.
VMware vSphere Health Check – CPU Memory and Storage checks explained The VMware vSphere Health Check performs quite a number of checks but doesn’t really explain why values are good or bad. Today I released three new sections that explain the theory behind the CPU, Memory and Storage checks. Click the “Health Check” button in the menu bar of my blog to access these new sections or just follow the links below:
vSphere 5 and vShield 5 Critical Considerations vSphere 5.0 introduces some great enhancements to host profiles and the ability to quickly and automatcially deploy new hosts (both stateful and stateless), which will be especially attractive to enterprise customers. These new features present some unique challenges and considerations for customers that are using or are thinking of deploying the VMware vShield Suite of products as part of their virtualization security strategy. In this article I’ll briefly discuss some things you must consider to successfully deploy both vSphere 5.0 and vShield App and Endpoint.
VDI 500 User FAST Pool Project If you have been following my recent posts you probably noticed that few of them relate to EMC storage arrays with FAST Cache and FAST VP implementation. If you would like to know more about how FAST Cache works I suggest the reading my article EMC FAST Cache effectiveness with VDI.
VDI Steady State Workload with VNX FAST Cache [Video] Last week I published the first of a series of videos that I have been recording for use by the EMC vSpecialist team. The videos are focused on VDI and EMC technology. The first one was VDI Bootstorm with VNX FAST Cache [Video]. Offloading Virtual Desktop IOs with Atlantis ILIO: Deep Dive myvirtualcloud.net 6/01/12 3:45 PM Andre Leibovici storage tips vdi virtualization Atlantis ILIO VDI
VDI Bootstorm with VNX FAST Cache [Video] I have been cooking some fresh new demos for the vSpecialist team at EMC. In the video below I demonstrate the effectiveness of the VNX FAST Cache comparing a 510 VM bootstorm with and without FAST Cache.
Voice Over IP (VoIP) Performance Evaluation on VMware vSphere 5.0 The majority of business-critical applications such as Web applications, database servers, and enterprise messaging systems have been successfully virtualized, proving the benefits of virtualization for reducing cost and streamlining IT management. However, the adoption of virtualization in the area of latency-sensitive applications has been slow partly due to unsubstantiated performance concerns. By taking VoIP service as an example, this paper demonstrates that vSphere 5 brings the same virtualization benefits to latency-sensitive applications, and vSphere 5 does this while driving good performance. In particular, vSphere 5 delivers excellent out-of-the-box performance in terms of voice quality when running VoIP service.
VMware vCloud Director 1.5 Performance and Best Practices VMware vCloud Director 1.5 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 1.5 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. vCloud Director 1.5 adds the following new features specific to accelerating application delivery in the cloud:
VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.0 Performance and Best Practices VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 5.0 provides business continuity and disaster recovery protection for VMware virtual environments. Protection can range from virtual machines (VMs) residing on a single, replicated datastore to all the VMs in a datacenter and includes protection for the operating systems and applications running in the VM.
New Training - VMware vSphere 5 Design Workshop The goal of this 3 day course is to equip consulting professionals with the knowledge, skills, and abilities to achieve competence in designing a VMware vSphere 5 virtual infrastructure. Given an organization’s constraints and requirements, the infrastructure should be available, scalable, manageable, and secure while meeting the organization’s business objectives. The course is based on VMware ESXi and VMware vCenter Server 5. This course discusses the benefits and risks of available design alternatives and provides information to support making sound design decisions. This course also provides an opportunity to practice your design skills by working with peers on a design project.
New Training -VMware View 5 Install, Configure and Manage This 4 days hands-on training course builds your skills in the VMware View™ suite of products: VMware View™ Manager, View Composer, and VMware ThinApp®. This course is based on the View 5.0 and ThinApp 4.6 releases. Before attending this course, you must be able to perform the following tasks:
• Create a template in VMware vCenter Server™ and deploy a virtual machine from the template. • Modify a template customization file. • Open a virtual machine console in vCenter Server and access the guest operating system.
New Book: Administering VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.0 Administering VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.0 is the complete, technical, hands-on guide to VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 5.0 installation and configuration for experienced VMware professionals. VMware forum moderator and vExpert Mike Laverick fully explains SRM 5.0’s failover/failback procedures, walks readers through configuring storage replication with hardware from several leading suppliers, and shows how to efficiently implement fast, automated, centralized disaster recovery. Drawing on his extensive experience with SRM and vSphere, Laverick identifies common pitfalls and errors, explains why they occur, and shows exactly how to fix them. Fully up to date for SRM 5.0, this book delivers “in-the-trenches” technical knowledge you won’t find anywhere else, including expert guidance for utilizing SRM 5.0’s advanced new vSphere Replication (VR).
In today’s post I want to update and amplify thoughts from an old post on Storage IO Control (SIOC). VMware customers that are using SIOC may sometimes see the following vCenter alarm: Non-VI workload detected on the datastore
Managing SSL Certificates in View 5.0 RTFM Education 13/01/12 3:08 AM Mike Laverick View You might not know this but in VMware View 5.0 the screws have been tightened light bit more with regards to View Client and SSL certificates. Up until this point you could get away with using the bulti-in certificates generated by the installer. That’s no longer the case, because just as with web-browsers – the new clients all check to see if the certificate matches the name that your connecting with and whether or not the certificate is trusted.
VMware VCAP Certification http://mylearn.vmware.com/mgrReg/plan.cfm?plan=16658&ui=www_cert Upon accomplishing VMware Certified Professional on VMware vSphere 4 (VCP4) you are eligible to pursue our intermediate level certification: VMware Certified Advanced Professional (VCAP). Available in Datacenter Administration and/or Datacenter Design, this program is appropriate for VCP4s that are ready to further enhance their skills with the virtual infrastructure and add new, industry recognized credentials to their list of accomplishments
VMware Certified Advanced Professional on vSphere 4 – Datacenter Design The VCAP-DCD is directed toward IT Architects and Consulting Architects who are capable of designing VMware solutions in a multi-site, large enterprise environment. They have a deep understanding both of VMware core components and their relation to storage and networking, and also of datacenter design methodologies. They also possess knowledge of applications and physical infrastructure, as well as their relationship to the virtual infrastructure.
VMware vSphere: Design Workshop [V4.x] http://mylearn.vmware.com/mgrReg/courses.cfm?ui=www_cert&a=one&id_subject=13754 DRBC Design - Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity Fundamentals http://mylearn.vmware.com/mgrreg/courses.cfm?ui=www_edu&a=one&id_subject=20313
VMware Knowledge Base Weekly Digest: New Articles Published for Week Ending 1/7/12 VMware Blogs 9/01/12 11:58 PM Datacenter |
This is the official VMware TAM Weekly Newsletter blog. The weekly newsletter produced by the VMware TAM community will be archived here approximately 5 days after it is sent out to our TAM customers.