Eric Sloof - Entries from August 2012

Wednesday, August 8. 2012

VMware Community Podcast - Behind the scenes

I was able to capture John Troyer and Alex Maier on video during this week's VMware Community Podcast. The podcast is about VMworld - "Not Supported" and Mike Laverick's new View book.

Technical Whitepaper - Secure Segmentation of Tier 1 Applications in the DMZ

VMware vShield App (vShield App) is a centrally managed, stateful, distributed virtual firewall. It protects virtual machines by placing a stateful firewall filter on every virtual network adaptor. vShield App enables simple-to-use, non-disruptive implementation of network security in VMware vSphere environments. This document focuses on the use of vShield App to secure applications in the DMZ.

There are two main ways to approach DMZ design with virtualization: fully collapsed and air gap. Because vShield App is transparent to network topology, the configuration of security groups and rules based on these groups remains the same between topologies.

Taking full advantage of virtualization technology, this approach, shown in the following figure, virtualizes the entire DMZ—including all network and security devices. This design places virtual machines of different security levels on the same physical VMware (ESXi) host and brings network security devices into the virtual infrastructure.

The security of placing virtual machines of different trust levels on the same host has been assessed and ratified by third-party studies. Sometimes described as a “DMZ in a box,” this configuration enables users to maximize server consolidation and realize significant cost reductions.

This completely virtual infrastructure can fully enforce isolation and security for traffic entering, within, and leaving the DMZ.

Secure Segmentation of Tier 1 Applications in the DMZ - VMware vShield App 5.0

Tuesday, August 7. 2012

Cool Tool - Free vOPS Server Explorer 5.1

vOPS Server Explorer 5.1 (VKernel's free tool suite) introduces improvements to existing utilities, and a new utility, Environment Explorer, which uses the same analytics and advisory engine from the paid vOPS Server Standard product to provide virtual administrators with a rapid assessment of the state of their environment. Specifically, Environment Explorer allows system administrators to:

Identify critical VM configuration errors such as memory limits and old snapshots that will severely affect performance and can be especially hard to track down and solve
Recognize performance bottlenecks from high CPU ready, memory swapping, device latency and other causes
Detect inefficiency/waste created by VMs with CPU, memory and storage over allocation
Find available capacity expressed as the number of VMs that can be deployed without causing performance bottlenecks
Pinpoint oversubscription of CPU, memory and storage resources and whether the over-allocation is impacting performance

Created with flickr badge.

vOPS Server Explorer 5.1 is available for download now: http://www.vkernel.com/download/server-explorer

Monday, August 6. 2012

Nimble Storage has released the CS400 series arrays

Nimble Storage offers a flash-enabled hybrid storage solution that combines MLC flash with high capacity disk. CASL (Cache Accelerated Sequential Layout) - the architecture backing Nimble arrays, is a log structure file system. In other words CASL coalesces random writes coming into the system and writes them out in a full RAID stripe to disk. There is an efficient garbage collection mechanism at the back end that ensures that full stripes are available to write to at all times (unlike hole-filling file systems such as ZFS and WAFL).

Nimble uses flash as a read cache (no writes are staged here even though some writes go to cache based on the IO profile) - this allows us to eliminate the overhead of RAID protecting flash. Also the metadata is always stored in cache so even if there is a cache miss, the access is accelerated. In addition, compression is turned on at all times. This is a LZ variant and natively supports variable sized blocks. So there's no need to incur the read-modify-write overhead that comes with space saving techniques typically.

So what does the above mean for VDI? There are a lot of read path enhancements for VDI including the more recent VSA accelerator from VMware. This is all good. In addition, VDI places higher loads on the storage array to address write demands and that is where CASL shines. The read storms are addressed using the flash cache and the write peaks using the coalescing techniques outlined above.

With the launch of the CS420-x2 array, Nimble expects to be able to support north of 2000 users within a single array (3U form factor) for a moderate workload profile (12-16 IOPS steady state), delivering very competitive storage cost/desktop as well as desktop density.

Saturday, August 4. 2012

VMware View Bootcamp - Mobile Secure Desktop: Cisco VXI Smart Solution

In this session we explore the complete, end-to-end architecture for the Mobile Secure Desktop, built on best of breed compute, networking, storage, security and collaboration technologies. This blueprint provides a prescriptive guide to removing the "guesswork" from delivering unified workspaces that embrace BYOD along with enterprise-grade collaboration and virtual desktops, built on a compute architecture that offers streamlined management with high performance for hundreds, to hundreds-of-thousands of users.

Speaker -- Arshad Saeed, Tech Marketing Manager, Cisco

VMware Mobile Secure Desktop Bootcamp

Friday, August 3. 2012

New Book - Building End-User Computing Solutions with VMware View

This book is all about VMware View 5.1 and ThinApp 4.7.2 administration - and it takes in a wide scope of complementary technologies from the likes of Teradici, BitDefender and F5 Networks. Towards the end the focus switches away from virtual desktops to look at the future of end-user computing including VMware’s ThinApp Factory and Horizon Appliction Manager.

This book is a not for profit venture. The monies raised by the sale of the book will be donated in full to the work of UNICEF. UNICEF carries out work across the globe that benefits all children regardless of their social, ethnic, religious or geographical location. It’s our sincere hope that people will use the legitimate sources for acquiring this book – and by doing so support the work of UNICEF.

More information available at Mike Laverick's website

Wednesday, August 1. 2012

VMware Labs presents an updated fling - Boomerang with support for View Desktops

It looks like the vmClient has a competitor. Boomerang is a simple client application that makes it easy to use multiple vSphere servers simultaneously. Users can easily perform tasks like power operations on the virtual machine or connect to it using the VMware Remote Console (VMRC), which is provided with vSphere Client.

Features

Supports connecting to multiple ESX and VC servers simultaneously.
Allows you to save your credentials for easy login to servers.
Favorites pane enables easy browsing through multiple virtual machines on different servers.
Simple user interface gives you quick access to connecting to a virtual machine or issuing power operations.
Keyboard navigation allows you to type the name of the virtual machine you want to use or to use directional keys to navigate.
Configurable automatic update checking.
Servers with large numbers of virtual machines are automatically collapsed into hyperlinks, which you can click to view subsets of the inventory or the entire thing.

For View desktops, you are able to choose between the RDP or PCoIP protocol and launch a remote desktop. Once you have launched a desktop, you will have a fully functional remote desktop experience that matches the existing Windows View Client.

Be one of the first one to try, rate and comment - http://labs.vmware.com/flings/boomerang

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