Eric Sloof

Last Friday I attended a seminar hosted by Arista Networks and XTG in Gouda where Frederik Vos delivered a real cool demo of the vEOS virtual appliance which is available for free at Artista’s website.

http://www.aristanetworks.com/en/products/eos/veos

vEOS is a Virtual Appliance that provides an industry-standard CLI based management interface of a VMware vNetwork distributed switch (vDS). To a network administrator, vEOS provides the management interface just like a physical switch – SSH/telnet access, industry standard CLI, and integration with SNMP management tools like HP Openview for auto-discovery of VMs. Furthermore, vEOS simplifies network administration tasks such as:

• Configuration of ports groups
• Configuration of uplinks
• Monitoring virtual switches, operation and status
• Creation of distributed port profiles for consistent management across physical and virtual networks

Video - How to deploy the Arista vEOS

With vEOS, both server and network administrators can manage the virtualized cloud infrastructure in tandem, using their own unique and well understood workflows. Another key benefit of vEOS is that it automates network provisioning during VM migration: P2V, V2V and V2C. When a VM migrates from physical port to virtual or from one virtualized host to another across the network, vEOS migrates the corresponding network settings providing end-to-end consistency. While other solutions require replacing the existing internal virtual switch with vendor specific product, causing outage during the insertion, Arista’s EOS is unique in its ability to work with existing virtual switches while providing a consistent administrative experience.

Getting Started with Cloud Foundry provides information about installing and starting VMware Cloud Foundry, the VMware Application Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution. This video is intended for anyone who wants to install, configure, and use VMware Cloud Foundry. 
 

Here’s a little write-up regarding my experiences with creating a WebApp and uploading it to the CloudFoundry.com website. The first step is to go to the website and sign-up for an account, after signing up, you will receive an email within one business day containing a user ID and a password. Besides the username and password, the email contains some additional information including a link to the getting stared guide on the CloudFoundry.com website.

To start using CloudFoundry.com you should first download the vmc command line tool and change your password. To learn how to download and use this tool please follow the instructions here:
http://support.cloudfoundry.com/entries/20012337-getting-started-guide-command-line-vmc-users

gem install vmc
gem install Sinatra

c:\Ruby192\hello>vmc services

============== System Services ==============

+---------+---------+-------------------------------+
| Service | Version | Description                   |
+---------+---------+-------------------------------+
| mysql   | 5.1     | MySQL database service        |
| redis   | 2.2     | Redis key-value store service |
| mongodb | 1.8     | MongoDB NoSQL store           |
+---------+---------+-------------------------------+

Put this in your pipe (taken from http://www.sinatrarb.com/)

require 'sinatra'
get '/hi' do
  "Hello World! (Eric Sloof-NTPRO.NL)"
end

c:\Ruby192\hello>hello
== Sinatra/1.2.2 has taken the stage on 4567 for development with backup from WEBrick
[2011-04-13 13:10:47] INFO  WEBrick 1.3.1
[2011-04-13 13:10:47] INFO  ruby 1.9.2 (2011-02-18) [i386-mingw32]
[2011-04-13 13:10:47] INFO  WEBrick::HTTPServer#start: pid=4676 port=4567
127.0.0.1 - - [13/Apr/2011 13:11:43] "GET /hi HTTP/1.1" 200 34 0.0068
EricSloof-PC - - [13/Apr/2011:13:11:43 W. Europe Daylight Time] "GET /hi HTTP/1.1" 200 34
- -> /hi
127.0.0.1 - - [13/Apr/2011 13:11:43] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 441 0.0010
EricSloof-PC - - [13/Apr/2011:13:11:43 W. Europe Daylight Time] "GET /favicon.ico HTTP/1.1" 404 441
- -> /favicon.ico

http://127.0.0.1:4567/hi
Hello World! (Eric Sloof-NTPRO.NL)

Now let’s push this WebApp to the cloud with c:\Ruby192\hello>vmc push hello and see what happens.

http://ntpro.cloudfoundry.com/hi
Hello World! (Eric Sloof-NTPRO.NL)

Continue reading "Running WebApps at CloudFoundry.com" »

Installing the VMware vSphere Client every time you want to use it takes time and can slow you down. What if you could run the vSphere Client from a network share or USB key. Learn how to run the vSphere Client in ThinApp mode (application virtualization) in this video by fellow vExpert David Davis. (vmwarevideos.com) (trainsignal.com)

VMware Forum 2011 is the place to learn how VMware, the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, and our partners are building on virtualization to deliver cloud infrastructure and management solutions that significantly reduce IT complexity, improve security and accelerate how applications are being built, deployed and run.

Check out this page for the upcoming worldwide events because this is your chance to catch up with top speakers from both VMware and its partners. Over the course of just one day, they will deliver actionable information that will ensure you can get started on optimizing your infrastructure immediately. They will show you what steps to take in building an innovative IT department that adds value and leads the company towards growth and success.

 

Mind mapping is a powerful technique that allows you to make the most of your brainpower by creating maps that use colour, lines, and images to capture and organize your ideas, information, and tasks.

VMware’s support team has created two new mind maps which will help you solving Management and Network issues. In order to use these minmaps, you have to use a recent version (9) of Adobe Acrobat.

Mindmap – vSphere Troubleshooting Network Issues

Mindmap – vSphere Troubleshooting Management Issues

 

 

VMinformer has made some significant improvements to make life easier for teams running or assuring virtual infrastructure. Going beyond just simple security configuration settings, it allows you to visualize your storage in a way that enables you to pin-point key issues quickly.  If you haven't tried VMinformer, or have not reviewed it recently you will be amazed to see what VMinformer shows you.

Check out more - http://www.vminformer.com/products/trial-edition A short video showing how you can use VMinformer a unique security assessment tool to rapidly identify the key security risks that effect your organizations VMware infrastructure.

When implementing virtualization technology, organizations must ensure that they can continue to maintain a secure environment and meet their compliance obligations. To do so, you will have to evaluate risks that might affect protected information and mitigate those risks through risk-appropriate standards, processes, and best practices.

This set of documents provides guidance on how to securely deploy VMware vSphere 4.1 (“vSphere”) in a production environment. The focus is on initial configuration of the virtualization infrastructure layer, which covers the following:

• The virtualization hosts (both VMware ESX® 4 and VMware ESXi™ 4)
  Configuration of the virtual machine container (NOT hardening of the guest operating system (OS) or any applications running within)
• Configuration of the virtual networking infrastructure, including the management and storage networks as well as the virtual switch (but NOT security of the virtual machine’s network)
• VMware vCenter™ Server, its database and client components
  VMware Update Manager (included because the regular update and patching of the ESX/ESXi hosts and the virtual machine containers are essential to maintaining the security of the environment)
  

 Download vSphere 4.1 Hardening Guide

The VMware vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS Technical Deepdive is available as an eBook for the Kindle now. So if you buy it once, you can read it everywhere. The price of the Kindle version is even lower (only $ 7.50) than the paperback  which was already a good bargain. In fact it's the cheapest and most cool vSphere book on the market. So hop over to Amazon.com and get your Kindle version of the VMware vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS Technical Deepdive written by the famous authors Frank Denneman and Duncan Epping.


  Get Kindle for iPad




VMware vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS Technical Deepdive zooms in on two key components of every VMware based infrastructure and is by no means a "how to" guide. It covers the basic steps needed to create a VMware HA and DRS cluster, but even more important explains the concepts and mechanisms behind HA and DRS which will enable you to make well educated decisions. This book will take you in to the trenches of HA and DRS and will give you the tools to understand and implement e.g. HA admission control policies, DRS resource pools and host affinity rules. On top of that each section contains basic design principles that can be used for designing, implementing or improving VMware infrastructures.

Instant access to VMware View virtual desktops possible from any web browser supporting HTML5 - no software installation required on the end-user device. HTML5 technology enables development of rich, highly interactive browser-based applications. Ericom has developed a fully functional, high-performance HTML5 client that enables seamless access to VMware View virtual desktops. Running wholly within the browser, the client runs on devices with an HTML5 compatible browser and requires no additional software installation on the end-user device.