Eric Sloof

Next week I’ll attend the VMware vSphere Manage for Performance Train The Trainer course. The Manage for Performance course equips administrators with the knowledge and skills to monitor and troubleshoot a vSphere installation. It’ll also cover fundamental design decisions to enhance performance. 

Scott Drummonds who has been working for VMware since January of 2007 is the man behind this new course. He participates in a wide variety of performance issues including VDI, performance problem solving, field support, competitive analysis, and general marketing activities:

Nearly a year ago I approached the VMware Education Services about designing a single or multiple day class focused on performance management, troubleshooting performance problems, and designing solutions for maximum performance.  I cited the perennial popularity of the VMworld performance troubleshooting lab as a demonstration of the potential market for this class.  I am incredibly pleased to announce that the content for this class is complete and we are soon to be offering it to the general public.

Scott’s colleague; Tom MacKay already attended the beta version of VMware vSphere Manage for Performance and he commented at Scott’s weblog:

Since I participated in the beta “shakedown” of the class with you, I cannot talk highly enough of the content and result! The overall content is what customers have asked us for over the past few years, and I am not only suggesting that my customer accounts attend the training, but that EVERY VMW SE, PSO, etc, engineer take it as well! Really impressed and excited to see more of this type of depth in training continue to come out of the ed folks!

I’ve already received the instructor guide and can tell you one thing, awesomeness! The course schedule and datasheet are available at VMware’s MyLearn education portal.

I’ve enjoyed a full week of vacation last week but while I was offline there was happening a lot in the virtualization world. One thing I’ve missed was the launch of PowerWF Studio version 2.0. Although the Devfarm team was kind enough to give me a heads up about their pending release,  I didn’t have enough bandwidth and time to download and test their evaluation copy. Now the suitcases are unpacked and I worked my way through a mega full inbox. It’s time to get started with the new release which marks a huge leap forward in the versatility and ease-of-use of PowerWF Studio.

• Extensive testing and user feedback ensure that this is the most versatile, stable and feature-rich version of PowerWF ever.
• Focusing on new users and real-world test cases have made learning PowerShell with PowerWF incredibly easy:
• Revised Help and Getting Started Guide ease the learning curve.
• Integrated examples allow sample workflows to be created directly from Help topics.
• Wizards have been added to simplify adding Input and Output parameters and deploying workflows to the PowerWF Agent.
• User Interface improvements have been made throughout the application.
• Major enhancements were made to several key areas:
• Parameterize workflows with step-by-step creation wizards and redesigned management dialogs.
• Create Workflows directly from PowerShell PS1 files or the embedded PowerShell editor.  Over 500 real-world PowerShell scripts have been successfully converted and tested by the Devfarm team.
• 40% improvement in overall application performance.
• Improved Plug-In Manager with support for removing PowerShell Snap-Ins and Modules from both PowerWF and the PowerShell environment.

After downloading and installing the PowerWF Ultimate Edition, the Plug-In Manager started the discovery process, all the currently installed modules, snapins and plug-ins popped up one by one.
I first opened up the PowerCLI item in the toolbox and every VMware command-let I could think of was there. The dragging and dropping begun and within a minute I produced my first workflow. It worked :-) the guys (and I’ve noticed some nice girls on their website) over at Devfarm really kept their promise, they created an awesome product which is going to rock your world. 30 day evaluation copies and pricing information are available now at PowerWF.com. Here is my little Jing movie.

Continue reading "PowerWF – Visualizing Virtualization " »

I thought you might be interested in the new fee tool that VKernel released today. Capacity View provides quick visibility and alerting to the storage and server capacity issues in your VMware virtualized infrastructure. This powerful tool is a desktop app that downloads in 2 minutes and can be connected to ESX, vCenter or VKernel's VM Stats or Optimization Pack applications.

Capacity View identifies capacity based performance issues such as virtual machine I/O latency or under-allocated CPU, memory or storage. Additionally, it monitors your available capacity for new VM deployments and shows you which over-provisioned VMs can be rightsized to free up wasted capacity.

http://www.vkernel.com/solutions/capacity-view

Trilead has released the greatly improved VM Explorer 2.0! VM Explorer now supports VMware vCenter. This allows VM Explorer to keep track of your VMs even if they are moved to another host by DRS or vMotion.

VM Explorer now comes with revamped support for ESX 4.0/vSphere. We also perfected the interoperability of backups between ESX and ESXi. Starting from version 2.0 you can launch vSphere client from within VM Explorer. This enables you to directly login to one of your VMs. Moreover, a lot of minor bugs have been fixed.

All these features are available for the same price as before. The upgrade is free of charge for all customers with a valid subscription. VM Explorer is priced at USD 690 or EUR 490 respectively. Please note that you only need to license VM Explorer per installation (not per ESX host or per core).

You can download the latest version and try it for free from their website - a free trial key can also be requested.

http://www.trilead.com

I'm excited to announce that Veeam has decided to sponsor my website, NTPRO.NL. Veeam is well known for its VMware tools and VMware infrastructure management solutions. They also have released a lot of free Virtualization Resources. Recently Eric Siebert, David Davis and Jack Fegreus  have written three great whitepapers which are also freely available. Last but not least, on March 22 Veeam will change the way you look at VMware backup forever. If you want to be the first to know how, you better register here.

5 Ways VMware vSphere Improves Backup and Recovery by Eric Siebert, VMware vExpert, Senior systems administrator at Boston Market

“New VMware vSphere and its vStorage technology improve data protection and disaster recovery. The White Paper explains how organization of all sizes can reduce storage utilization by 30%, increase the full backup speed by 50% and incremental backup speed by 90%, lower the cost of near-CDP by 80% while increasing reliability.”

How Virtualization Cuts CDP Costs by 80% by David Davis, VMware vExper,t Director of Infrastructure at TrainSignal.com.

“The White Paper compares 3 different options of implementing CDP and shows how virtualization-enabled CDP—or Near-CDP—becomes the most affordable and most logical disaster recovery choice for businesses of all sizes.”

openBench Lab Report: Better Data Protection for VMware vSphere by Jack Fegreus Managing Director openBench Labs.

“White paper focuses on how IT professionals can achieve better VMware vSphere data protection and significantly simplify sophisticated IT backup and recovery procedures in virtual environments that include both ESX and ESXi hosts to meet Service Level Agreements (SLAs) with aggressive RTO and RPO requirements.”

Remote Desktop Manager is a small (and free) application used to manage all your remote connections and virtual machines. Add, edit, delete, shared, organize and find your remote connection quickly. Compatible with Microsoft Remote Desktop, Terminal Services, VNC, LogMeIn, Team Viewer, Ftp, SSH, Telnet, Dameware, X Window, VMware, Virtual PC, PC Anywhere, Hyper-V, Citrix, Radmin, Microsoft Remote Assistance, Sun Virtual Box and more.

http://remotedesktopmanager.com/

The session videos recorded by VMware are available at the Virtualization Forum Content Portal, by registering you will gain access to Keynote and Breakout Session records from the 2010 road show.

•  Key-note : transformeer uw bedrijf met VMware
•  Klantverhaal : de virtuele werkplek van PGGM
•  The cloud - internal & external : bouw een interne cloud dat gereed is voor de externe cloud
•  Desktop als een Managed Service
•  Virtualization Management: transformeer het beheer van uw gevirtualiseerde datacenter
•  Application Delivery : implementeer applicaties zonder conflict
•  BC/DR : verbeter business continuity met virtualisatie
•  Platinum sponsorsessies: EMC, HP, NetApp, Trend Micro

http://www.vmware-forum.com/vforum/nijkerk/video/ 

A few weeks ago Nicholas Weaver over at http://nickapedia.com/ has released a nice little tool which keeps you informed of who is on your vCenter server, but in the new version 2 which was just released, there’s a massive list of new features including Twitter integration. Now instead of just monitoring sessions on your vCenter server, the VMM will now monitor a large number of changes to multiple objects. Within the UI there is now the ability to turn on or off specific Alert categories. Here is a list of the possible choices:

Sessions
New Session
List Sessions
Terminated Session (New!)

Cluster
Creation
Deletion
Changes (HA, DRS, etc)

Host
Connection/Disconnection
Addition/Removal
Changes (Network, Storage, Maintenance Mode State)

Resource PoolCreation
Deletion
Changes

Virtual Machine
Creation
Deletion
Changes (Device Add/Remove, CPU, Memory)

Distributed Switch
Creation
Deletion
Changes (Uplinks, Port Groups)

Datastores
Renaming

By far Nicholas Weaver’s most favourite feature in the new VMM 2.0 is that you can now use Twitter as a channel for alerting. Besides Twitter, you can also use the notification tray, email or an RSS feed as alert channel.

Geoff White has started a project page for *esxplot* where you can download the current release bundle, as well as alpha and beta releases when they become available.

esxplot is a GUI application that lets you explore the data collected by esxtop in batch mode. The program takes a single command line argument which is the esxtop batch mode output file. You can also simply start esxplot without any arguments, and enter a dataset file via the File attribute of the menu bar. Esxplot loads the data in this file and presents the metrics as a hierarchical tree where the values are selectable in the left panel. In the right panel, a graph is plotted (value over time) of the selected metric, in this way, you can “browse” the contents of these somewhat unwieldy files.

http://www.durganetworks.com/esxplot/

One of my students at last week’s VMware Technical Sales Professional training demoed me his home lab with a real great White Box. Alain used the Aspire X5810 - a multimedia-ready desktop flashing a cool, brushed-metal chassis and streamlined design. This desktop occupies just one-third of the space of a traditional PC. The default CPU is an Intel® Core™2 Quad Processor Q8300 (4M Cache, 2.50 GHz, 1333 MHz FSB), check this page to see if the CPU is Virtualization Technology (VT-x) compatible. The onboard network card isn’t supported by ESX4i, so you have to buy an additional Intel E1000.

Technical Specifications

Model Name: Aspire X5810
Processor & Chipset: Intel® Core™2 Quad processor (up to 95 W)
Intel® Core™2 Duo processor
Intel® G43 Express Chipset
Memory: Up to 8 GB of DDR3 1066 MHz SDRAM (dual-channel support on four DIMMs)
Storage: Serial ATA hard disk up to 1TB (ICH10)