Eric Sloof - Entries from September 2013

Monday, September 30. 2013

Cool Tool - vGuestExplorer

Manfred Meier over at VMwareDirectory has launched a new utility. The vGuestExplorer is a Windows Explorer style tool which can copy files and folders to and from Virtual Machines, even without Network connectivity.

It connects through PowerCLI and VIX API to the ESXi Host or vCenter Server and lists all Virtual Machines with running VMware Tools. The files are retrieved and managed by VMware Tools on the Guest Virtual Machine. It will save you time, creating and connecting ISO files or disks to Virtual Machines to transfer files.

Friday, September 27. 2013

VMware vCloud Hybrid Service explained by Chris Colotti

In this VMworld TV video the VMware vCloud Hybrid Service is explained by Chris Colotti.

VMware vCloud Hybrid Service is a secure, dedicated hybrid cloud service operated by VMware, built on the trusted foundation of VMware vSphere. The service supports existing workloads and third-party applications as well as new application development, giving IT a common platform for seamlessly extending its data center to the cloud.

vCloud Hybrid Service is available in two service types—Dedicated Cloud and Virtual Private Cloud—and includes five primary service components:

Compute (vCPU and vRAM)
Storage
Internet bandwidth
Public IP addresses
Production support

Wednesday, September 25. 2013

Interview with Darla Hershberger about VMware Log Insight

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VMware vCenter Log Insight delivers automated log management through log aggregation, analytics and search, extending VMware’s leadership in analytics to log data. With an integrated cloud operations management approach, it provides the operational intelligence and enterprise-wide visibility needed to proactively enable service levels and operational efficiency in dynamic hybrid cloud environments.

VMware vCenter Log Insight 1.5 Technical Preview 2 - What's New

Tuesday, September 24. 2013

Interview and Demo with HyTrust at VMworld 2013

Despite its name, the HyTrust Appliance is not a physical piece of hardware. It’s a VMware vSphere-compatible virtual appliance that’s deployed right alongside the rest of your virtual infrastructure. It can be deployed on the same hypervisor that it is actively protecting.

HyTrust Appliance sits in the management plane of the virtual infrastructure. In other words, it sits between the administrators of the virtual infrastructure—the virtualization admins, the network admins, the application owners—and the virtual infrastructure itself. From this centralized vantage point, HyTrust Appliance intercepts all administrative requests for the virtual infrastructure, determines whether or not the request is in accordance with the organization’s defined policy, then permits or denies the request as appropriate.

Monday, September 23. 2013

Now available as Rough Cut - Networking for VMware Administrators

The Rough Cuts service from VMware Press gives you exclusive access to an evolving manuscript that you can read online or download as a PDF and print. A Rough Cuts book is not fully edited or completely formatted, but you'll get access to new versions as they are created.

Overview

Increasingly, virtualization administrators and architects must have a deep understanding of networks. However, many have come to virtualization from other IT backgrounds, and do not have the knowledge they need to interact effectively with network specialists or solve problems with virtual networks. Networking for VMware Administrators fills this crucial gap, illuminating the core concepts required to "speak the language" of networking, and showing exactly how they apply to VMware vSphere.

Drawing on their extensive experience architecting, delivering, and troubleshooting virtual networks with VMware, Cisco, and other technologies, Christopher Wahl and Steve Pantol address all this and more:

Physical networking: concepts, models, Ethernet, hardware, protocols, VLANs and routing/Subnetting
Virtual switching and how it differs from physical switching
vSphere standard and distributed switch concepts, terminology, configuration, and design
Third party switches, including Nexus 1000v: architecture and overview
Storage networking: use cases, design, and configuration
Other design scenarios: 1 Gb Ethernet, 10 Gb Ethernet, blade servers, converged traffic, and virtual NICs

Go to: Networking for VMware Administrators by Christopher Wahl and Steven Pantol

Upcoming Book Release – Networking for VMware Administrators by Christopher Wahl

Interview with Bruce Davie about VMware NSX at VMworld 2013

Meet Bruce Davie, Lead Architect for NSX, for a walkthrough about VMware's new product: NSX. What it is, how to use it and best practices, all in one video.

Wednesday, September 18. 2013

Now available as Rough Cut - Virtualizing and Tuning Large Scale Java Platforms

More than 55% of the world's server systems are now virtualized, and 50-60% of today's critical business applications are built with Java. Information about optimizing virtualized systems running Java is critical – and it's remarkably scarce.

Often, there's a mindshare gap” between VMware vSphere administrators and Java developers, who have fundamentally different knowledge and experience. Now, the world's leading expert in Java enterprise virtualization bridges the gap between these fields, offering both the theory and practical solutions that vSphere and Java administrators need to optimize large-scale Java-based systems.

Both a reference and a performance cookbook, Virtualizing and Tuning Large Scale Java Platforms will be indispensable to all technical professionals and IT managers responsible for Java performance in virtualized enterprise systems. Emad Benajmin provides detailed case studies, specific technical advice, troubleshooting help, up-to-date FAQs, and much more. You'll learn how to correctly size, scale, and rationalize virtualized Java platforms; and tune VMware vSphere for the unique challenges of large Java applications.

Benjamin addresses crucial technical issues such as Java garbage collection, and helps you modernize Java application architecture using in-memory databases – preparing your applications for both Big Data and Fast Data. Whether you're virtualizing Websphere, Weblogic, Tomcat, or any other Java-based enterprise application platform, this guide will help you get all the performance, utilization, reliability, and manageability you're paying for.

Start Reading: Virtualizing and Tuning Large Scale Java Platforms by Emad Benjamin

Tuesday, September 17. 2013

vCloud Automation Solutions and NSX labs ready to enroll

HOL-SDC-1307 - vCloud Automation Solutions

The VMware vCloud Automation Solutions lab will accelerate the journey to a lights-out, fully automated, and efficient Software-Defined Datacenter. You can explore vCAC, Orchestrator, PowerCLI and AutoDeploy working together to solve real-world problems.

VMware products used: vSphere, vCloud Director (vCD), vCloud Automation Center (vCAC), vCNS, vCenter Server, vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) and PowerCLI.

HOL-SDC-1319 - VMware NSX for Multi-Hypervisor Environments

A Tech Preview of the exciting new VMware NSX for vSphere product announced at VMworld. Learn how VMware NSX virtualizes your network and simplifies your datacenter. This lab is currently based on a beta version of code and you may encounter some user interface issues during the lab exercises.

The lab will be improved with newer code as the product moves closer to release. For now, brave the rapids, jump in with both feet and have a go at at VMware NSX, the premier solution for Network Virtualization.

Sunday, September 15. 2013

Exclusive CloudPhysics Demo By Irfan Ahmad

In this VMworld TV video you will see an exclusive demo by CloudPhysics CTO Irfan Ahmad. CloudPhysics is uniquely positioned to solve operations management problems because of the collective intelligence it derives from analyzing the world's IT operations data, combined with its unique, patent-pending data center smart modeling and simulation techniques.

Customers use CloudPhysics to identify and troubleshoot hundreds of operational issues by accessing focused operational analytics -- referred to as "Cards" -- available on the CloudPhysics SaaS platform.

Example capabilities include:

Health Checks - CloudPhysics acts as an early warning health service for the IT operator to identify operational hazards before they emerge by continuously checking and matching a user's environment against a live database of field issues, including firmware bugs, hardware incompatibilities and other potential problems. CloudPhysics builds the collective intelligence for health checks through its Knowledge Base Advisor, continuously gathering best practices from vendors and field knowledge from the CloudPhysics community of sys admins.
Reporting - Admins gain insights into their VMware environments through interactive queries using CloudPhysics' Card Builder, which requires no scripting or knowledge of schemas. Users can pull pre-built reports (Cards) shared by community members or build unique ones and share with community members and colleagues.
Analysis - CloudPhysics gives users big data-driven analytics for storage, compute and other systems to identify radical efficiency and safety improvements for VMware. Customers lower cost and risk by using results based on the CloudPhysics smart modeling techniques.
Planning - CloudPhysics customers can simulate planned purchases or configuration changes before rolling out in production. For example, CloudPhysics predicts the latency benefit of I/O caching and determines optimal cache sizes to balance cost and performance. Customers run this analysis before making storage hardware purchases (like SSD devices) to avoid wasteful procurement while dramatically improving the performance of business-critical applications. In the case of mission-critical configuration changes common to HA applications, CloudPhysics analyzes HA configuration scenarios before customers commit them into production. Customers optimize resource settings while ensuring critical VMs are protected against server failures.

Friday, September 13. 2013

ProfileUnity, FlexDisk and Flex-IO explained by Jason Mattox

In this VMworld TV video you can see some amazing product demos presented by Liquidware's CTO, Jason Mattox.

ProfileUnity, which is emerging as the “go-to” persona management solution for VMware Horizon View environments when more robust functionality is required over the basic features of VMware Persona Manager. The FlexApp feature extends ProfileUnity to provide both user-installed and department-installed applications on demand, thus reducing the number of desktop images required.
FlexDisk provisions flexible user VMware VMDKs on a VMFS to eliminate application and data streaming over the network. A single FlexDisk with an application or data can be shared among many users enabling an organization to reduce application and data storage space requirements by roughly 100:1.
Flex-IO leverages ESXi host RAM to accelerate common IO across your virtual desktops which significantly increases the number of available IOPS to 25,000 or more per ESXi host. Flex-IO also reduces your storage footprint by up to 50% with disk compression. The combination of RAM to accelerate IOPS along with disk compression is what makes Flex-IO able to greatly simplify non-persistent VDI environments and removes the need for costly high-speed storage arrays and expensive maintenance.

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