Eric Sloof

Did you know that there are several free tools available from SolarWinds?  Recently they compiled a list of their customers’ favourite FREE network tools including: Real-time NetFlow Analyzer, TFTP Server, Exchange Monitor, IP Address Tracker and more. Check out their Top 5 Free Tools.

Jon Hall has submitted a VMworld 2010 session which can be found in the Virtualization 101 section.

Title: VMware Certified Advanced Professional Certifications Are Here

Session Id: V18061

Abstract: This session announces the availability of two new Advanced certifications, the VCAP Enterprise and the VCAP Design certifications. These certifications allow a VMware Certified Professional to demonstrate advanced mastery of two areas of expertise: Enterprise Administration and Design. The VCAP Enterprise candidate demonstrates advanced abilities in implementation and administration of large and/or complex vSphere environments, while the VCAP Design candidate demonstrates advanced abilities in designing vSphere solutions. This session will further describe the purpose of these two certifications, along with the requirements for obtaining each.

Update: Please keep in mind that VMware Education Services hasn’t officially released the new titles yet. They will be making an announcement soon regarding the new certification plans, and of course provide more detail around the program and its implications. 

Update: Scott Vessey -> RT @esloof: VMware Certified Advanced Professional - http://bit.ly/afCFNO < The titles have changed, all revealed in next 2 week

Title: Building a White Box
Session ID: V16760

In this session Eric Sloof details his journey to install ESX Server on white box commodity hardware. This is not rocket science (and it's certainly not supported!), but is great for home labs and test labs for those who know what they're doing. You can't slap any old motherboard, nic, and disk drive together and expect it to work, but if you want to try it.

Perhaps I should explain the term ""ESX Whitebox"" a little bit more since I have been digging into this matter so much that I even got the slang down. An ESX whitebox is a piece of hardware (or rather a combination of different hardware pieces) that will run ESX. Sounds pretty self-explanatory right? Well, the key thing here is that it is not that hard to find hardware that runs ESX without any issues. In fact, VMware even has a list up that details exactly which hardware is supported by ESX so it's not so hard to find supported hardware. The problem is that this is mostly server hardware which equals expensive, big, heavy and noisy. Not something I was looking for.

Richard Garsthagen about the public voting:

Starting today and ending on May 26th you can vote on what sessions you would like to see at this year's VMworld. We received a record amount of session submissions. We where not able to publish them all in the public voting system as some have 'confidential' stuff in them or others did not follow the basic submission rules, but more then 600 submissions did make it into the public voting system. So please browse around and let us know what you want to see during the next VMworld events. 
You can find public voting here: http://www.vmworld.com/community/conferences/2010/cfpvote

A short 7 minute video to show you how Veloxum can improve the performance of your VMware environment. When you finish this video you might want to download the software and try it yourself.

This soon to be released VMware Training Course will show you how to follow best practices for secure design, deployment, and operations of a VMware vSphere™ environment. Through lecture, discussion, and hands-on practice, you will gain the knowledge and skills necessary to meet the security and compliance goals of your organization. Because this course is currently beta, there may be changes to the final course.

Objectives   

• Identify vulnerabilities in the current design of a vSphere environment and recommend corrective actions
• Harden vSphere components as described in the security hardening guides for vSphere 4
• Use VMware® vShield Zones to provide firewall protection to virtual machines and monitor virtual machine network traffic
• Recommend configuration and change management policies, processes, and systems 
   

Continue reading "Upcoming new training course - VMware vSphere:..." »

The VMware Player 3.1 Release Candidate includes most of the same great features added to VMware Workstation including all of the graphics, performance and virtual hardware improvements. Some release highlights include:

• OpenGL 2.1 support for Windows 7 and Vista guests: The addition of hardware accelerated OpenGL 2.1 support to the WDDM driver enables many more graphics applications to run inside of your virtual machines.
• Improved graphics performance: Significant enhancements have been made to the VMware WDDM driver that have produced benchmark results that are up to 80% faster. The updated driver also produces smoother video playback and addresses many reported rendering issues. Of course games run better as well!
• 8-way SMP support plus virtual disks up to 2TB in size: The virtual hardware continues to become more powerful to meet the needs of Workstation customers who are running server class applications.
• OVF 1.0 support: Including the OVF Tool with this release enables users to easily import or export virtual machines and vApps and move them to vSphere or up into the cloud.
• Direct Launch: Blur the distinction between running native and virtual applications by launching an application installed in a virtual machine directly from the start menu or taskbar of the host system.
• Automatic software updates: These VMware applications can now detect when a new version is released and are able to update at the click of a button.
• Fedora virtual machines: VMware is excited about finally offering support for running one of the most popular Linux distributions on the planet!

http://communities.vmware.com/community/beta/player

This paper provides an overview of the considerations and best practices for deployment of VMware vSphere on NFS based storage. It also examines the myths that exist and will attempt to dispel confusion as to when NFS should and should not be used with vSphere. It will also provide some troubleshooting tips and tricks. It’s written by Paul Manning, a Storage Architect in the technical marketing group at VMware and is focused on virtual storage management.

The significant presence of Network Filesystem Storage (NFS) in the datacenter today, as well as the lower cost-per-port for IP based Storage, has lead to many people wanting to deploy virtualization environments with Network Attached Storage (NAS) shared storage resources. 

As virtualization increases adoption, so does the deployment of VMware ESX servers that leverage NAS. For the purpose of clarity, both NFS and NAS refer to the same type of storage protocol and will be used as terms for the same thing throughout this paper. 

The capabilities of VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 (VI3) on NFS are very similar to the VMware vSphere™ on block-based storage. VMware offers support for almost all features and functions on NFS—as it does for vSphere on SAN. Running vSphere on NFS is a very viable option for many virtualization deployments as it offers strong performance and stability if configured correctly.

http://vmware.com/files/pdf/VMware_NFS_BestPractices_WP_EN.pdf

CCBoot allows a diskless boot of either Windows XP, Windows 2003, Windows Vista, Windows 7, or Windows 2008 from an iSCSI target virtual machine remotely located over a standard IP network. Diskless boot makes it possible for VM’s to be operated without their own virtual disk. The diskless VM is connected to a VMware Workstation VMDK file over a network and boots up an operating system from a remotely located virtual machine. CCBoot is the convergence of the rapidly emerging iSCSI protocol with gPXE diskless boot technology.

Rob de Veij over at Robware.net has released version 2.9 of the most awesome utility I know, well if you don’t count in the vmClient :-) You better check out the newest release of RVTools. I already did, and recorded a walkthrough which can be watched here in HD quality. You can also take a peek at Vimeo.

RVTools is a windows .NET 2.0 application which uses the VI SDK to display information about your virtual machines and ESX hosts. Interacting with VirtualCenter 2.5, ESX 3.5, ESX3i, ESX4i and vSphere 4 RVTools is able to list information about cpu, memory, disks, nics, cd-rom, floppy drives, snapshots, VMware tools, ESX hosts, nics, datastores, switches, ports and health checks. With RVTools you can disconnect the cd-rom or floppy drives from the virtual machines and RVTools is able to list the current version of the VMware Tools installed inside each virtual machine and update them to the latest version.

Version 2.9 (April 2010)
• On vHost tab new fields: Vendor and model.
• On vHost tab new fields: Bios version and Bios release date.
• On vInfo tab new field: VM overall size in bytes (visible when using VI API 4.0)
• On vSnapshot tab new fields: Snapshot filename and size in bytes (visible when using VI API 4.0)
• New vNic tab. The vNic tab displays for each physival nic on the host the following fields: Host, datacenter, cluster name, network device, driver, speed, duplex setting, mac address, PCI and wakeon switch.
• Layout change on vHost, vSwitch and vPort tabpages. They now all start with host name, datacenter and cluster name.
• The commandline function ExportAll extended with an extra optional parameter. It's now possible to specify the directory where the export files are written.