Eric Sloof

This session will cover recommendations for using VMware vSphere High Availability (vSphere HA) to create a resilient software defined data center. We will start with an update on recent enhancements to vSphere HA. From there, we will move on to the recommendations for networking, storage, heartbeat datastores, isolation response, and admission control. Additional topics include: vSphere HA advanced settings, VM guest OS monitoring, options for protecting applications, and vSphere HA in Auto Deploy and Metro Cluster environments. The session will conclude with a sneak peak at the future of vSphere HA.

Performance Best Practices for VMware vSphere 5.1, provides performance tips that cover the most performance-critical areas of VMware vSphere 5.1. It is not intended as a comprehensive guide for planning and configuring your deployments.

• Chapter 1, “Hardware for Use with VMware vSphere,” provides guidance on selecting hardware for use with vSphere.
• Chapter 2, “ESXi and Virtual Machines,” provides guidance regarding VMware ESXi software and the virtual machines that run in it.
• Chapter 3, “Guest Operating Systems,” provides guidance regarding the guest operating systems running in vSphere virtual machines.
• Chapter 4, “Virtual Infrastructure Management,” provides guidance regarding infrastructure management best practices.

This book is intended for system administrators who are planning a VMware vSphere 5.1 deployment and want to maximize its performance. The book assumes the reader is already familiar with VMware vSphere concepts and terminology.

http://www.vmware.com/pdf/Perf_Best_Practices_vSphere5.1.pdf

In this video we have Cormac Hogan (Senior Technical Marketing Architect at VMware) discuss and demonstrate some interesting aspects of this new feature. Cormac touches on the following:

- Scale Out Storage

- VM Storage Profile Creation

- Provisioning a VM using Storage Profiles

- vMotion

- Resilience

Note: This a Technology Preview

For additional information, check out Cormac Hogan's blog post.

VMware vCloud Director orchestrates the provisioning of software-defned datacenter services, to deliver complete virtual datacenters for easy consumption in minutes. Software-defned datacenter services and virtual datacenters fundamentally simplify infrastructure provisioning and enable IT to move at the speed of business.

Numerous enhancements are included within vCloud Director 5.1, making it the best infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) solution in the marketplace today. This document highlights some of these key enhancements and is targeted toward users who are familiar with previous vCloud Director releases.

This presentation will show you what has changed in: Snapshots, Storage Profiles and the Elastic vDC.

Technical White Paper - What’s New with VMware vCloud Director 5.1

@crystal_lowe: Now that VMworld US 2012 is in the books, it is time to start planning your trip to VMworld EMEA 2012, in beautiful Barcelona, Spain! You know you don’t want to be in the doghouse for heading to Spain without your partner, so check out what Spousetivities has planned for the ones you care about while you are busy soaking up knowledge at the VMworld 2012 conference.

Like the US event, Spousetivities will have some goodies to give away for participants. In the past, that’s included things like iPads, iPods, Kindles, and other nifty electronic gadgets. If that isn’t enough to get you or your sweetie excited, how about one of the following tours:

• Barcelona City Tour
• Dali Tour
• Montserrat and Cava Trail 
  
  

These tours are an amazing opportunity that you won’t want to miss. However, there is not a lot of room and the spaces will fill quickly. Don’t wait–register today!

http://spousetivities.com/

vSphere supports several command‐line interfaces for managing your virtual infrastructure including the vSphere Command‐Line Interface (vCLI), a set of ESXi Shell commands, and PowerCLI. You can choose the CLI set best suited for your needs, and write scripts to automate your CLI tasks.

The vCLI command set includes vicfg- commands and ESXCLI commands. The ESXCLI commands included in the vCLI package are equivalent to the ESXCLI commands available on the ESXi Shell. The vicfgcommand set is similar to the deprecated esxcfg- command set in the ESXi Shell.

You can manage many aspects of an ESXi host with the ESXCLI command set. You can run ESXCLI commands as vCLI commands or run them in the ESXi Shell in troubleshooting situations. You can also run ESXCLI commands from the PowerCLI shell by using the Get-EsxCli cmdlet. See the vSphere PowerCLI Administration Guide and the vSphere PowerCLI Reference.

The set of ESXCLI commands available on a host depends on the host configuration. The vSphere Command‐Line Interface Reference lists help information for all ESXCLI commands. Run esxcli --server <MyESXi> --help before you run a command on a host to verify that the command is defined on the host you are targeting. You can use this link to get your copy of the VMware ESXi 5.1 Reference Poster.