Eric Sloof

Storage Virtual Appliances unlock the resources of the ESX server and provide a virtual SAN that enables datastores to be shared. By leveraging an available virtual machine, SVAs provide a shared storage environment without having to install a complex shared storage system.

Storage Virtual Appliance (SVA)

Storage appliance software running under VMware ESX® as a virtual machine. SVA takes control of and virtualizes Direct Attached Storage (DAS), for example internal disk drives and/or externally attached array.

• Presents it to VMware ESX over iSCSI as a virtual SAN .
• This fully enables all features which normally require an expensive external SAN High Availability and VMotion.
• Dramatically lowers the cost of deploying a server virtualization environment.
• Traditionally you would purchase 2-3 physical servers, then have expense of purchasing SAN storage.
• Now you can have a SAN using the server’s internal storage!

I Jumped in my car and I’m heading to Frankfurt, on my way to the VCDX Design Exam. This exam consists of a combination of multiple choice questions, drag and drop items and design scenarios that utilize a tool somewhat like Visio. It’s four hours in length to allow time for me to comment on each item. Saturday 9:30 it’s show time.

The VMFS forensic investigator and fellow vExpert Mike La Spina posted a great article about some unrevealed storage secrets. His article “Understanding VMFS volumes “ contains  everything you should, want or ought to know about the UUID, snapshot’s and devices.

Understanding VMFS volumes is an important element within VMware ESX environments. When storage issues surface we need to correctly evaluate the VMFS volume states and apply the appropriate corrective actions to remediate undesirable storage events. VMFS architecture is not publically available and this certainly adds to the challenge when we need to correct a volume configuration or change issue. So lets begin to look at the components of a VMFS from what I have been able to decrypt using direct analysis.

http://blog.laspina.ca/roller/Ubiquitous/entry/understanding_vmfs_volumes

Besides writing the new book “VMware VI3 Implementation and Administration”, Eric Siebert also created a new version of his VMware vLaunchPad. The dark ages are behind us. You can get a glimpse of a new shiny version here.

Keith Hill received some requests to turn his Effective PowerShell blog posts into booklet form which he has done.  He expects that this document will grow over time as he adds new items.

I am a big fan of the “Effective” series of programming books from Effective COM to Effective XML. Without trying to be too presumptuous, I wanted to capture some of the tidbits I have picked up over the last couple of years using Windows PowerShell interactively and writing production build and test scripts. These items were written for PowerShell 1.0. Where appropriate I have added PowerShell 2.0 Update sections to discuss how the item is affected by the upcoming 2.0 release. As a final note, a number of the PowerShell code snippets shown use functionality from the PowerShell Community Extensions which can be downloaded from http://www.codeplex.com/PowerShellCX.

Via Arne Fokkema over at ICT-Freak.nl

Virtual Computer is on Track to Deliver First PC Lifecycle Management Solution based on Bare-Metal Client Hypervisor at the end of March 2009.

According to NxTop beta tester Steve Dale, director of IT at Camiant, “NxTop addresses our organization’s most challenging pain points. Every user here has a notebook PC and like many organizations, managing backups in a notebook-centric environment is a major challenge, now with NxTop it’s a snap. An added benefit of NxTop is the convenience of abstracted hardware which allows me to manage a single image for operating system (OS) deployment rather than many images that are hardware specific. I’m also enjoying the ability to run two OS simultaneously and the security of full disk encryption built into the solution.”

VC5 greatly expands Vyatta’s security feature set, adding SSL-based OpenVPN, intrusion prevention system (IPS), and web URL filtering among many other improvements.

New features in VC5 include:

• New Web-based Graphical User Interface
• Improved VPN Security with OpenVPN
• Enhanced Security via Intrusion Prevention
• Improved Performance with Web Caching and Ethernet Bonding
• Support for Network Access Policies via URL Filtering
• DNS forwarding and Dynamic DNS
• Improved Virtualization Performance – VMware tools and Xen paravirtualization 
• Additional Hardware Support -- Bridged Ethernet over ADSL, wireless modems (3G), and RAID-1.

Vyatta Community Edition Download : VC5 - VMWare Virtual Appliance, March 9, 2009; 174 MB

Kirk Munro finished posting another release of the VMware Infrastructure Management PowerPack with a few more enhancements.

This release greatly improves usability through the new icons that were added (and I mean *greatly* improves…the value the icons add is huge).  It’s also the first PowerPack release that takes advantage of some really cool Visio scripts that I’ve been working on.  The Visio scripts I’m referring to were largely inspired by Alan Renouf’s vDiagram script, although the Visio script I ended up with doesn’t look anything like the original.  I’m itching to talk more about those scripts, but I want to write a blog post specifically on that topic so watch for more on this in the next few days.  For now I’ll simply point out that to use the Visio functionality, you have to download the additional VESI_Visio.zip file that was added to the VMware Infrastructure Management PowerPack document page and install it as per the instructions in that document (see the “How to enable vDiagram support” section).  Visio 2007 is required.

Revision history:

March 9, 2009 (2.1.5)
- added icons to the tree as well as the items in the grid.
- fixed a few minor defects that could occur before you connected to a host.
- added vDiagram actions to datacenter and cluster objects.

Google's Experimental Search section has added a feature that lets users enable auto-completion of search queries from their main Google pages. I’ve been a bit jealous of Duncan over at Yellow-Bricks, when you Google for his name, he pops up in the auto completion with 126.000 results, but finally I’m in. I’ve still a long way to go but I’m proud of my ranking at 23.100. ;-)

This driver enables read-only access to files and folders on partitions formatted with the Virtual Machine File System (VMFS). VMFS is a clustered file system that is used by the VMware ESX hosts to store virtual machines and virtual disk files. The VMFS driver comes with a command line interface (CLI) to mount and analyze VMFS volumes. The VMFS driver was tested on Linux and Windows based hosts, but should work on any platform that supports Java. The driver supports VMFS version 3 (VMFS3).

Volumes can now be mounted as a regular file system using a WebDAV client! The webdav command opens a VMFS volume, and serves the contents of the file system as WebDAV/HTTP. The volume can be directly mounted in most operating systems.  The WebDAV server binds on localhost (127.0.0.1) and port 50080 by default. This can be changed by optionally specifying the host IP and port to bind to. I’ve tested the driver and was able to browse the VMFS using the Internet explorer.

C:\Users\Eric Sloof\Downloads\VMFS\vmfs_r66>java -jar fvmfs.jar ssh://root:vmware@192.168.178.251/vmfs/devices/disks/vml.010000000053304d554a31335036333831333920202020202053414d53554e:5 dir /