VMware - Eric Sloof

Monday, February 2. 2015

Register for VMware's Online Launch Event

This event is so BIG that VMware is offering broadcasts around the globe the entire week of February 2…and continuing the excitement throughout February.

All event registrants will automatically receive access to additional content, engagement, and activities via our online event platform.

Register here

Friday, January 16. 2015

Get your 365-day License Keys for 9 VMware products

To enable IT professionals to explore VMware technology, VMware User Group (VMUG) and VMware announced today that they are partnering with Kivuto Solutions to provide current and new VMUG Advantage Subscribers with a new EVALExperience offering for selected products.

EVALExperience is an extended product evaluation offering for select products and is exclusively available to VMUG members with a new or current VMUG Advantage Subscription. This member benefit is available at $200 annually as part of the VMUG Advantage Subscription fee.

Go to the EVALExperience

Tuesday, January 13. 2015

VMware Virtual SAN Sizing Tool

The Virtual SAN Sizing Tool provides assistance for design considerations and automates storage sizing calculations for Virtual SAN infrastructures.

The purpose of this tool is to help determine the hardware specifications for hosts in a Virtual SAN cluster required to run a set of virtual machines defined by a set of input characteristics. These important assumptions should be understood before using this tool:

All hosts in the cluster are assumed to have an identical hardware profile, i.e. numbers of hard drives and flash devices, amount of physical RAM, and number of CPU cores
All virtual machines are assumed to be identical in storage characteristics, i.e. number of VMDKs, size of VMDKs (assumed identical for all disks), number of snapshots, and virtual memory size
All virtual machines are assumed to have the same Virtual SAN policy, i.e. number of failures to tolerate and number of disk stripes per object

The tool is designed so that you can easily vary inputs to see the impact on the sizing output, thus allowing you to iterate manually for more sophisticated analyses.

VMware Virtual SAN Sizing Tool

Monday, September 8. 2014

Site Recovery Manager and Stretched Storage Tech Preview

Are you embracing an Active-Active data center strategy for continuous availability of your apps but also want an easy way to manage planned and unplanned failure events ? Have you ever wondered why you couldn't use SRM in a Stretched Cluster deployment ? In future, you will no longer have to choose between SRM or Stretched Clusters. We will preview a new hybrid model where you can benefit from the key capabilities of both solutions.

Shobhan Lakkapragada - Product Line Manager, VMware and Aleksey Pershin - Staff Engineer, VMware will demonstrate upcoming capabilities of SRM that allow you to live migrate a large set of apps prior to planned maintenance activities or to avoid any disaster events; We also show how SRM can simplify recovery operations if there is a failure in one of the Active-Active data centers.

Monday, August 25. 2014

VMware Integrated OpenStack Empowers IT to Provide Developers with Open API Access to Enterprise-Class VMware Infrastructure

At VMworld 2014, VMware announced VMware Integrated OpenStack, a solution that will enable IT organizations to quickly and cost-effectively provide developers with open, cloud-style APIs to access VMware infrastructure.

The VMware Integrated OpenStack distribution will leverage VMware’s proven software-defined data center technologies for compute, network, storage and management to provide enterprise-class infrastructure that reduces capital expense (CAPEX), Operational Expense (OPEX) and total cost of ownership for production-grade OpenStack deployments.

News Facts:

The software-defined data center is the ideal architecture for building and operating a private, hybrid or public cloud.
VMware provides the best-in-class infrastructure for building a software-defined data center with OpenStack.
VMware will deliver an OpenStack distribution optimized for VMware virtualization solutions that leverages all of VMware’s software-defined data center components—compute, networking, storage and management—not just the hypervisor, for building enterprise-class OpenStack clouds.
VMware will package, test and support all components of the distribution, including the open source OpenStack code.
VMware is running a qualified beta program for VMware Integrated OpenStack. Interested customers can fill out the sign up page here. VMware Integrated OpenStack is scheduled for general availability in the first half of 2015.
VMware has also partnered with OpenStack distributions including Canonical, HP, Mirantis, Piston, Red Hat and SUSE to make sure those vendors' OpenStack offerings work well with VMware infrastructure.

Read the full paper here

Thursday, July 31. 2014

VMware Horizon Mirage Training Videos

VMware Horizon Mirage is a layered image- management solution that separates a desktop, laptop, or virtual endpoint into logical layers that are owned and managed by either your IT organization or the end user. You can update IT-managed layers while maintaining end-user files and personalization. To maximize end-user productivity, snapshots and backups of layered endpoint images enable quick recovery or rollback in case of failure.

VMware Mirage - Overview

VMware Mirage - Windows Migration

VMware Mirage - Best Practices in Automation

VMware Mirage - CVDs, Layers, Policies, and Rules

VMware Mirage - Best Practices with Remote and Branch Offices

Monday, April 14. 2014

VMware's response to the OpenSSL security issue

The following is a response to the current situation with the software security vulnerability dubbed Heartbleed:

The VMware Security and Engineering teams are working on remediation for the VMware products that have been impacted. VMware is acutely aware of the seriousness of the Heartbleed vulnerability, and all available resources are being directed toward a resolution amidst this industry-wide situation.

VMware plans to release updated products and patches for all affected products in this article by April 19th. Please check this article for any updates or exceptions to this timeframe.

See the lists for affected products, and refer to the Resolution/mitigation section for steps to protect your systems while updates are being prepared.

Resolution/mitigation

By deploying vSphere 5.5 (and other relevant VMware products) on an isolated management network, the exposure to CVE-2014-0160 is reduced. Hosting vSphere components directly on the Internet is strongly discouraged. Virtual machines that are exposed to the Internet should be updated in case they are affected. For the latter, refer to the instructions by the operating system provider.

VMware is working on updating its products to remediate the issue. When software updates for CVE-2014-0160 are available, deployment of these updates should be accompanied by replacing certificates and resetting passwords as per best practices. Instructions on how to do this for each affected product will be provided at the same time updates are released.

New VMware Security Advisory VMSA-2014-0004 (Heartbleed)

Friday, March 7. 2014

VMware Virtual SAN Design and Sizing Guide

VMware Virtual SAN is a new hypervisor-converged, software-defined storage platform that is fully integrated with VMware vSphere. Virtual SAN aggregates locally attached disks of hosts that are members of a vSphere cluster, to create a distributed shared storage solution.

Virtual SAN enables the rapid provisioning of storage within VMware vCenter as part of virtual machine creation and deployment operations. Virtual SAN is a hybrid disk system that leverages both flash-based devices, to provide optimal performance, and magnetic disks, to provide capacity and persistent data storage.

This delivers enterprise performance and a resilient storage platform. The distributed datastore of Virtual SAN is an object-store file system that leverages the vSphere Storage Policy Based Management (SPBM) framework to deliver application-centric storage services and capabilities that are centrally managed through vSphere virtual machine storage policies. This document focuses on the definitions, sizing guidelines, and characteristics of the Virtual SAN

Wednesday, September 4. 2013

VMware Fusion 6 and Workstation 10 released and available for download

VMware Fusion 6 is optimized for the latest Macs and ready for OS X Mavericks and Windows 8.1 to deliver the ultimate Windows on Mac experience.

Designed for OS X Mavericks
Mavericks multiple display support
Ready for Windows 8.1
Improved Boot Camp support
Optimized for the latest Macs
Dictation in Windows
Faster performance
Support for up to 16 vCPUs, 8TB disks and 64GB of RAM
Redesigned UI
More granular control of resources
Over 50 new features

Download VMware Fusion

VMware Workstation 10 continues VMware’s tradition of delivering innovative features that technical professionals rely on every day. With support for Windows 8.1, tablet sensors, and expiring VMs, it's the perfect tool to make your work seamless, intuitive, and more connected.

Unity mode has been enhanced to seamlessly work with Windows 8.1 UI changes.
Workstation 10 can now convert a Windows 8.1 physical PC to a virtual machine.
Support for 16 vCPUs, 8 TB SATA disks and 64GB of RAM
New Virtual SATA disk controller
Now supporting 20 virtual networks
USB3 streams support for faster file copying
Improved application and Windows VM startup times
SSD Pass through

Create restricted virtual machines that can expire at a predefined date and time. When powered on, the virtual machine will query the server at specified time intervals, storing the current system time in the restricted VM's policy file as the last trusted timestamp.

Industry first to provide virtual tablet sensors that enable virtual machines to take advantage of the accelerometer, gyroscope, compass, and even the ambient light sensor when running on a tablet.

Multiple monitor set-ups are easier than ever, whether you are using 2, 3, or 4.
VMware-KVM provides a new interface for using multiple virtual machines

Download VMware Workstation

Keynote: VMware vCHS, Puppet, and Project Zombie

Nicholas Weaver is the Cloud Automation Architect for VMware's vCloud Hybrid Service (vCHS) platform and the primary architect behind the vCHS automation framework (Project Zombie). He is also a co-creator of the PuppetLabs Razor project and many VMware-specific free tools. He previously worked in the CTO office for EMC, in the EMC field as a vSpecialist, and as a infrastructure engineer in financial, media, and retail companies. Nick loves software-driven control, hacking prototypes together, speaking at user groups, and demonstrating automation innovation to the masses. Nick can be found on Twitter and Github as @lynxbat.

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