Eric Sloof

VMware Horizon Application Manager is a hosted service that enables organizations to centrally manage the provisioning, access and usage of cloud, software-as-a-service (SaaS) and ThinApp-virtualized Windows applications. This solution enables IT departments to extend on-premises Active Directory identities to the public cloud, simplifying the security of application access. Unlike other federation solutions, Horizon Application Manager does not require an enterprise or public organization to make additional capital investments in complex and expensive hardware.

At its core, Horizon Application Manager includes an identity-as-a-service hub that securely extends a user's existing identity in systems such as Microsoft Active Directory into the cloud. This process simplifies the management of identities across multiple application types that are found in a typical enterprise. This simplification benefits both IT and users by collapsing separate identity silos into a single enterprise identity that can secure user access across private and public cloud resources.

In addition, managers have control over user access policies and are able to track user activity, via usage reports. Following installation, administrative tasks, such as user entitlement, matching Active Directory groups with applications, and so on, can be accessed through a Web portal.

End users open a single sign-on portal from which they have self-service access to the organization's application catalogue. Users can only open the applications to which they are entitled. They can easily move from application to application without having to re-enter their login credentials. Applications can be accessed across a broad
range of devices.

Continue reading "Understanding VMware Horizon Application Manager" »

vCloud Connector is an enterprise product that provides a single user interface for overseeing multiple public and private clouds and for transferring cloud content from one cloud to another. It allows you to connect multiple clouds, both internal and external, in a single user interface.

Using vCloud Connector, you can stop and start virtual machines, check their performance, and transfer virtual machines, vApps, and templates from one cloud to another. vCloud Connector consists of three distinct components: the vCloud Connector UI, the vCloud Connector Server, and vCloud Connector Nodes.

The vcloud.vmware.com website allows you to access the vCloud Connector UI through your browser and helps you make the move to a hybrid cloud environment. You can view your vCloud Connector through it and you share access to your clouds with others. The website also connects you to a range of public cloud service providers offering evaluation cloud offers and a community of other vCloud Connector users.

Download VMware vCloud Connector v1.5 (free)

This video will show you how ThinApp and Horizon Application Manager together are improving the management and entitlement of applications.

http://vmware.com/go/thinapp

vSphere Replication is a replication engine that is part of SRM 5.0 and requires ESXi 5.0 and later, giving an alternative means of protecting and replicating virtual machines between sites. It is entirely managed within the SRM interface after initial deployment and configuration, and integrates with storage array–based replication to provide full coverage of the virtual environment.

The assumption is that there are multiple databases for vSphere Replication already configured for use, one at each site. In this evaluation guide, we will be using Microsoft SQL Server as a database, and using native SQL authentication for access. Workflow covered will be as follows:

1. Deploy vSphere Replication Management Servers (VRMS).
2. Configure VRMS.
3. Pair VRMS.
4. Deploy vSphere Replication Server (VRS).
5. Register VRS.
6. Configure virtual machines for protection with vSphere Replication.
7. Create a protection group using vSphere Replication–protected virtual machines.

Fred van Donk has written an extensive article on Deploying vSphere Replication and setting up multiple Microsoft SQL databases.

This High Performance Data with VMware vFabric GemFire Best Practices Guide provides information about best practices for the deployment of data fabric systems. The guide describes the best practices for VMware vFabric GemFire data caching systems and its various design constructs. The document captures four main deployment patterns commonly used to implement enterprise data requirements:

  • vFabric GemFire deployed as an enterprise data management system.
  • vFabric GemFire deployed as L2 cache.
  • vFabric GemFire deployed for HTTP session management.
  • vFabric GemFire deployed as a faster mass data mover—for example, real-time reporting.

This guide provides best practice guidelines for deploying vFabric GemFire. The recommendations in this guide are not specific to any particular set of hardware or to the size and scope of any particular implementation. The best practices in this document provide guidance only and do not represent strict design requirements because enterprise data requirements can vary from one implementation to another. However, the guidelines do form a good foundation on which you can build—many of our customers have used these guidelines to successfully implement an enterprise data fiber for their enterprise applications.

High Performance Data with VMware vFabric GemFire

This document describes the architecture and features of vShield Edge and vShield App, and presents some reference designs for solutions built using these products. The designs described are meant to be representative of common business problems that organizations face when they further increase their virtualization footprint and move toward a cloud model of IT. By seeing how these problems are addressed, and mapping them to the actual issues they currently must address, customers should better understand how to deploy vShield Edge and vShield App in their own environments.

 VMware vShield Edge and vShield App Reference Design Guide

VMware vShield is a suite of security virtual appliances built for VMware vCenter Server and VMware ESX integration. vShield is a critical security component for protecting virtualized datacenters from attacks and misuse helping you achieve your compliance-mandated goals. vShield App is an interior, vNIC-level firewall that allows you to create access control policies regardless of network topology. A vShield App monitors all traffic in and out of an ESX host, including between virtual machines in the same port group. vShield App includes traffic analysis and container-based policy creation.

In this video I'll show you that vShield App installs as a hypervisor module and firewall service virtual appliance. vShield App integrates with ESX hosts through VMsafe APIs and works with VMware vSphere platform features such as DRS, vMotion, DPM, and maintenance mode. vShield App provides firewalling between virtual machines by placing a firewall filter on every virtual network adapter. The firewall filter operates transparently and does not require network changes or modification of IP addresses to create security zones. You can write access rules by using vCenter containers, like datacenters, cluster, resource pools and vApps, or network objects, like Port Groups and VLANs, to reduce the number of firewall rules and make the rules easier to track.

You should install vShield App instances on all ESX hosts within a cluster so that VMware vMotion operations work and virtual machines remain protected as they migrate between ESX hosts. By default, a vShield App virtual appliance cannot be moved by using vMotion. The Flow Monitoring feature displays allowed and blocked network flows at the application protocol level. You can use this information to audit network traffic and troubleshoot operational.

A few weeks ago I’ve delivered a VMware Site Recovery Manager training course and one of the attendees was Arnim van Lieshout. Besides being a co-author of the VMware vSphere PowerCLI Reference: Automating vSphere Administration guide, Arnim also works as a VMware PSO consultant. While we were trying to set-up SRM Host Based Replication, Arnim showed me a real cool trick to do some fast troubleshooting regarding the VPXD daemon, also known as the vCenter Service.

This video guides you through the process of troubleshooting a corrupted vCenter Server database with vpxd.exe -s and helps you to fix VPX daemon start-up problems. The video also helps you eliminate common causes for your problem by verifying the configuration of your database, validating network connectivity, and verifying the configuration of the vCenter Server service with vpxd.exe -b.

VMware vSphere is the industry's most widely deployed virtualization solution. However, performance problems are inevitable and require an in-depth understanding of the interaction and relationship between software and hardware. Aimed at VMware administrators and engineers and written by a team of VMware experts, this resource provides guidance on common CPU, memory, storage, and network-related problems. Plus, step-by-step instructions walk you through techniques for solving problems and shed light on possible causes behind the problems Divulges troubleshooting methodologies, performance monitoring tools, and techniques and tools for isolating performance problems. Details the necessary steps for handling CPU, memory, storage, and network-related problems. Offers understanding on the interactions between VMware vSphere and CPU, memory, storage, and network. VMware vSphere X Performance is the resource you need to diagnose and handle VMware vSphere performance problems.

This paper provides a deep look at the performance implications of the live storage migration of a VM running a large SQL Server database workload. Performance of the workload when migrating different components of the database (data, index, and log) was measured and compared against the steady state performance (when there was no migration). Experiments discussed in this paper also show the impact of I/O characteristics of the database components on the migration time of the virtual disk containing them. Based on the knowledge gained from the experiments, a few best practices are suggested for the live migration of the storage of the virtual machines (VMs) with minimal impact to the performance of applications running in them.

Live storage migration is the missing piece in liberating VMs and their associated files completely from the physical hardware on which they reside. Predictable migration times—with minimal impact on the performance of the application accessing the virtual disk that is migrated—are expected from the vSphere’s storage vMotion feature. This paper offers a deeper look at the interaction of svMotion with a large, active SQL database workload. The study includes application behavior when migrating individual virtual disks used by the database and the impact application I/O traffic had on the svMotion of a particular virtual disk. The study showed consistent and predictable disk migration time that largely depended on the capabilities of the source and the destination arrays. svMotion increased the CPU consumption of the VM running the test workload from 5% to 22% depending on the load conditions. The I/O patterns of the SQL database workload had noticeable impact on svMotion throughput (and the disk migration time).

 Storage vMotion of a Virtualized SQL Server Database