Eric Sloof - Entries from March 2013

Friday, March 29. 2013

vCloud Automation Center Videos

VMware vCloud Automation Center (also known as vCAC) is comprised of three modules: Virtual Resource Manager (VRM), External Cloud Manager (ECM) and Physical Resource Manager (PRM).

Together, these modules provide an enterprise-wide system for provisioning virtual, cloud and physical machines and for comprehensively managing the machine lifecycle from user request and administrative approval through decommissioning and resource reclamation, while dramatically improving resource cost control and management. Built-in customization and extensibility features also make vCloud Automation Center a highly flexible means for customizing machine configurations as needed and integrating machine provisioning and management with other enterprise-critical systems.

VMware vCloud Automation Center Documentation

Thursday, March 28. 2013

New Technical White Paper - VMware vCloud Director Infrastructure Resiliency Case Study

VMware vCloud Director enables enterprise organizations to build secure private clouds that dramatically increase datacenter efficiency and business agility. Coupled with VMware vSphere, vCloud Director delivers cloud computing for existing datacenters by pooling vSphere virtual resources and delivering them to users as catalog-based services. It helps users build agile infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud environments that greatly accelerate the time to market for applications and the responsiveness of IT organizations.

Resiliency is a key aspect of any infrastructure—it is even more important in IaaS solutions. This technical paper was developed to provide additional insight and information regarding the use of VMware vSphere PowerCLI to automate the recovery of a vCloud Director–based infrastructure. In particular, it focuses on automation of the recovery steps for vCloud Director 1.5–managed VMware vSphere vApp workloads.

The recovery of management components can be achieved using VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager and will not be discussed. It is already available in the original VMware vCloud Director Infrastructure Resiliency Case Study. vSphere PowerCLI is a powerful command-line tool that enables users to automate all aspects of vSphere management, including network, storage, virtual machine, guest operating system (OS) and more. Included since the release of version 5.0.1, vSphere PowerCLI introduced support for vCloud Director.

vSphere PowerCLI is distributed as a Microsoft Windows PowerShell snap-in and includes more than 300 PowerShell cmdlets, along with documentation and examples.This technical paper discusses the use of PowerShell and PowerCLI to automate the recovery of vCloud Director resource clusters.

Download: VMware vCloud Director Infrastructure Resiliency Case Study - Automation with Microsoft Windows PowerShell and VMware vSphere PowerCLI

New Technical White Paper - VMware VXLAN Deployment Guide

Organizations worldwide have gained significant efficiency and flexibility in their datacenters as a direct result of deploying VMware server virtualization solutions. Although compute has been virtualized, network and security technologies in datacenters have struggled to keep pace with the innovations.

Many VMware customers are now looking to implement a network virtualization solution that brings flexibility to datacenter networks. Virtual eXtensible Local Area Network (VXLAN), part of VMware vCloud Networking and Security, addresses the current networking challenges. This document offers detailed deployment guidelines and step-by-step instructions on how to build VXLAN-based datacenter networks.

A VXLAN-based network virtualization solution addresses the following key challenges that exist in the traditional physical network:

Limited number of isolated layer 2 (L2) networks (VLAN – 4096)
Inability to change the physical network configuration on demand
Limited L2 diameter (because of Spanning Tree Protocol (STP) limitations) that restricts pooling of compute resources available across the datacenter

For more details on the VXLAN-based network virtualization solution and various design consideration details, refer to VMware Network Virtualization Design Guide. This document is for both vSphere and network administrators. It provides step-by-step configuration instructions for the following two scenarios:

A brand-new VXLAN network design spanning two compute clusters
A migration of an existing two-cluster deployment from a standard VLAN to a VXLAN network

Download: VMware VXLAN Deployment Guide

Tuesday, March 26. 2013

Latest Fling from VMware Labs - View Pool Manager

View Pool Manager is a Fling that allows VMware View administrators to easily manage users across desktop pools and security groups.

One of the biggest challenges VMware View administrators face in large deployments is desktop pool maintenance. Commonly each desktop pool has Active Directory security groups with the number of users a given desktop pool will support. As employees leave/join the organization, security groups require maintenance to ensure the number of users in each group correctly match the amount of desktops available. VMware View Pool Manager allows VMware View administrators to easily manage users across desktop pools and security groups for large deployments.

This tool allow administrators to bind an Active Directory connection and specify:
How many users there should exist per group (based on VMware View pool size)
Floating or Persistent deployment
Source Security Groups (all users to be distributed to pools)
Destination Security Groups (All groups the users may be assigned to)

This tool help VMware View administrators to save hours of work adding, removing and maintaining users, desktop pools and security groups while ensuring each security group does not hold more users than the amount of desktops pool assigned to a given VMware View desktop pool.

Download View Pool Manager

This fling was created by Andre Leibovici (@andreleibovici) at myvirtualcloud.net

Sunday, March 24. 2013

Video - Run Workflows from the vSphere Web Client

Beyond the initial installation, operators can also take advantage of the automation capabilities of vCenter Orchestrator because of its new integration with the vSphere Web Client and the vCenter Single Sign On component. Operators can run workflows from the vSphere inventory browser in just a couple of clicks. Based on the object from which it is run, a workflow's input parameters also get populated automatically to save time and eliminate errors. Operators can run multiple workflows concurrently, or schedule them as recurring or future off-hour tasks. For large organizations, administrators can allow different groups of operators to have access to different categories of workflows.

Saturday, March 23. 2013

Video - Horizon View HTML Access vs PCoIP

This video is recorded by Gunnar Berger, it shows the difference between Horizon View HTML Access and PCoIP. The new HTML Access is part off the recently released feature-pack. It allows users to connect to virtual desktops from their Web browsers without having to install Horizon View Client software on their client systems. The HTML Access Agent, which runs on Horizon View desktops, is the component that enables users to use HTML Access to connect to their desktops. You must install the Remote Experience Agent with the HTML Access Agent on the desktops that you want to be accessed via HTML Access.

Thursday, March 21. 2013

50% Exam Discount on all VCP Exams

VMware is offering a 50% discount on VCP Cloud, IaaS, VCP5-DV and VCP5-DT exams

Tuesday, March 19. 2013

New Book - VMware vSphere Design, Second Edition

Written by two virtualization experts and packed with real-world strategies and examples, VMware vSphere Design, Second Edition will help you design smart design decisions.

Shows IT administrators how plan, deploy, maintain, and optimize vSphere virtualization solutions
Explains the design decisions typically encountered at every step in the process and how to make the right choices
Covers server hardware selection, network topology, security, storage, virtual machine design, and more
Topics include ESXi hypervisors deployment, vSwitches versus dvSwitches, and FC, FCoE, iSCSI, or NFS storage

Find out the "why" behind virtualization design decisions and make better choices, with VMware vSphere Design, Second Edition, which has been fully updated for vSphere 5.x.

VMware vSphere Design, Second Edition

Managing Multi-Hypervisor Environments with vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager 1.1

To simplify the management of virtual environments that have VMware ESX or ESXi hosts and third-party hypervisors such as Microsoft Hyper-V, you can connect your third-party hypervisors to a vCenter Server System by using venter Multi-Hypervisor Manager. After you connect both your VMware and third-party hypervisors to vCenter Server, you can use the vSphere Client to manage your entire virtual environment.

The vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager 1.1 supports the management of Microsoft Hyper-V hypervisors in vCenter Server. From the third-party hosts inventory of the vSphere Client, you can view the Hyper-V hosts configuration, and perform management tasks such as power off, reboot, disconnect, reconnect, and remove the host from the third-party hosts inventory.

For maintenance purposes, extended management options, or improved performance, you can convert a virtual machine from a third-party host to an ESX or ESXi host in your vCenter Server system. To perform virtual machine conversions with venter Multi-Hypervisor Manager in the vSphere Client, you need to have configured a vCenter Converter Standalone server during the installation of the vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager server.

After you install and configure venter Multi-Hypervisor Manager for virtual machine conversions, you can use the vSphere Client to hot clone virtual machines from the third-party hosts inventory tree to an ESX or ESXi host in your vCenter Server system. venter Multi-Hypervisor Manager does not provide a built-in conversion feature but exposes the conversion capabilities of vCenter Converter Standalone in the vSphere Client.

VMware vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager 1.1 (beta)

Learn more about VMware Certification at VMwareCertificationVideos.com

Learn the value of VMware Certification and aspire to be exceptional. Discover how to get started on your journey to career success with VMWare certification at VMwareCertificationVideos.com

Cloud Certification Overview

David Day, Director of Global Curriculum & Development, discusses the new cloud certification courses paths. He covers the professional, advanced, and expert role levels and the data center virtualization, cloud, end user computing, and cloud applications stacks. New in this strategy are opportunities to leverage skills/certification in one stack to move into another stack.

This new website contains videos presented be Andy Cary and Undeleeb Din which can be very useful, they will tell you more about VMware's certification tracks and how to prepare for the exams.

VMwareCertificationVideos.com

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