Sunday, December 15. 2013
VMware Virtual SAN explained by Melina McLarty
Senior staff engineer Melina McLarty discusses Virtual SAN functionality which virtualizes local physical storage resources of ESXi hosts and turns them into storage pools that can be carved up and assigned to virtual machines and applications according to their quality of service requirements.
Thursday, December 12. 2013
Command-Line Installation and Upgrade of VMware vCenter Server 5.5
This technical note describes how to install, upgrade, and uninstall vCenter Server and related components by using the Windows command‐line interface. The command‐line installation requires you to log on to the local machine.
The command‐line installation process includes downloading the vCenter Server installer, gathering the required data, and using the command parameters and samples in this technical note to install the products according to your specifications.
The command‐line installation process includes downloading the vCenter Server installer, gathering the required data, and using the command parameters and samples in this technical note to install the products according to your specifications.
Latest Fling from VMware Labs - Real-Time Audio-Video Test Application
This application verifies the correct installation and operation of the View Horizon Real-Time Audio-Video functionality. It provides a player that displays the “virtual webcam” feed, and also loops back the audio if required.
This allows for testing without a third party app (which often requires user accounts such as Skype, WebEx, etc.).
The application can also perform load testing by forcing the video and audio stream to continuously run again, without a third party app dropping the call after a period of time.
Features:
- Displays webcam images at 1:1 resolution
- Automatically starts streaming images when launched (and audio will be looped back if selected)
- Ability to loop the audio-in back to audio-out
- No need to create user accounts to see RTAV
- Supports the VMware Virtual Webcam and Physical Webcams
Wednesday, December 11. 2013
VMware NSX Network Virtualization Design Guide
IT organizations have gained significant benefits as a direct result of server virtualization. Server
consolidation reduced physical complexity, increased operational efficiency, and the ability to dynamically
re-purpose underlying resources to quickly and optimally meet the needs of increasingly dynamic business
applications are just a handful of the gains that have already been realized.
Now, VMware’s Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) architecture is extending virtualization technologies across the entire physical data center infrastructure. VMware NSX, the network virtualization platform is a key product in the SDDC architecture. With NSX, virtualization now delivers for networking what it has already delivered for compute and storage.
In much the same way that server virtualization programmatically creates, snapshots, deletes and restores software-based virtual machines (VMs), NSX network virtualization programmatically creates, snapshots, deletes, and restores software-based virtual networks. The result is a completely transformative approach to networking that not only enables data center managers to achieve orders of magnitude better agility and economics, but also allows for a vastly simplified operational model for the underlying physical network.
With the ability to be deployed on any IP network, including both existing traditional networking models and next generation fabric architectures from any vendor, NSX is a completely non-disruptive solution. In fact, with NSX, the physical network infrastructure you already have is all you need to deploy a software defined data center.
Download the VMware NSX Network Virtualization Design Guide. This document is targeted toward virtualization and network architects interested in deploying VMware network virtualization solutions.
Now, VMware’s Software Defined Data Center (SDDC) architecture is extending virtualization technologies across the entire physical data center infrastructure. VMware NSX, the network virtualization platform is a key product in the SDDC architecture. With NSX, virtualization now delivers for networking what it has already delivered for compute and storage.
In much the same way that server virtualization programmatically creates, snapshots, deletes and restores software-based virtual machines (VMs), NSX network virtualization programmatically creates, snapshots, deletes, and restores software-based virtual networks. The result is a completely transformative approach to networking that not only enables data center managers to achieve orders of magnitude better agility and economics, but also allows for a vastly simplified operational model for the underlying physical network.
With the ability to be deployed on any IP network, including both existing traditional networking models and next generation fabric architectures from any vendor, NSX is a completely non-disruptive solution. In fact, with NSX, the physical network infrastructure you already have is all you need to deploy a software defined data center.
Download the VMware NSX Network Virtualization Design Guide. This document is targeted toward virtualization and network architects interested in deploying VMware network virtualization solutions.
Tuesday, December 10. 2013
New Book - Troubleshooting vSphere Storage
Become a master at troubleshooting and solving common storage issues in your vSphere environment
- Identify key issues that affect vSphere storage visibility, performance, and capacity
- Comprehend the storage metrics and statistics that are collected in vSphere
- Get acquainted with the many vSphere features that can proactively protect your environment
In Detail
Virtualization has created a new role within IT departments everywhere; the vSphere administrator. vSphere administrators have long been managing more than just the hypervisor, they have quickly had to adapt to become a ‘jack of all trades’ in organizations. More and more tier 1 workloads are being virtualized, making the infrastructure underneath them all that more important. Due to this, along with the holistic nature of vSphere, administrators are forced to have the know-how on what to do when problems occur.
This practical, easy-to-understand guide will give the vSphere administrator the knowledge and skill set they need in order to identify, troubleshoot, and solve issues that relate to storage visibility, storage performance, and storage capacity in a vSphere environment.
This book will first give you the fundamental background knowledge of storage and virtualization. From there, you will explore the tools and techniques that you can use to troubleshoot common storage issues in today’s data centers.
You will learn the steps to take when storage seems slow, or there is limited availability of storage. The book will go over the most common storage transport such as Fibre Channel, iSCSI, and NFS, and explain what to do when you can’t see your storage, where to look when your storage is experiencing performance issues, and how to react when you reach capacity. You will also learn about the tools that ESXi contains to help you with this, and how to identify key issues within the many vSphere logfiles.
What you will learn from this book
Identify the root cause of storage issues within vSphere
Understand where to look when storage is suddenly not available
Use esxtop to monitor and discover pain points in your infrastructure
Diagnose and resolve SCSI reservations and queuing issues
Design storage properly based on workloads
Monitor and alert on your thinly provisioned disks and data store capacity
Utilize Storage DRS to proactively balance your capacity and workload on your data stores
Maintain compliance in terms of placement with Profile Driven Storage
Grant VMs the performance they need with Storage I/O Control
Decipher storage-related error entries in the vSphere logfiles
Approach
This is a step-by-step example-oriented tutorial aimed at showing the reader how to troubleshoot a variety of vSphere storage problems, and providing the reader with solutions that can be completed with minimal effort and time in order to limit damage to work.
Who this book is written for
If you are a vSphere administrator, this is the book for you. This book will provide you with 'need to know' information about the various storage transports that ESXi utilizes, the tools and techniques we can use to identify problems, and the fundamental knowledge and steps to take to troubleshoot storage-related issues. Prior knowledge of the VMWare environment is assumed.
Troubleshooting vSphere Storage - Paperback
Troubleshooting vSphere Storage - Paperback
Wednesday, December 4. 2013
Latest Fling from VMware Labs - vCO-CLI
vCO-CLI aims to provide exploratory programming to the vCO ecosystem. It connects to a running vCO server and presents a JavaScript REPL (Read-Eval-Print-Loop) to the user. All vCO plug-ins, workflows and the entire scripting API can be accessed, invoked and experimented with from the shell.
This turns vCO-CLI into a powerful educational and experimentation tool. Access to the plug-in’s inventory is integrated into the UI for easy navigation to managed entities (vCenter objects, LDAP entries, remote systems, HTTP endpoints, etc). For advanced users, vCO-CLI can improve productivity considerably by minimizing the turnaround time between designing and running a workflow.
It can also display a REPL right in the middle of a workflow. This powerful technique, similar to a breakpoint, allows the workflow developer to troubleshoot and fix bugs faster.
Download vCO-CLI
This turns vCO-CLI into a powerful educational and experimentation tool. Access to the plug-in’s inventory is integrated into the UI for easy navigation to managed entities (vCenter objects, LDAP entries, remote systems, HTTP endpoints, etc). For advanced users, vCO-CLI can improve productivity considerably by minimizing the turnaround time between designing and running a workflow.
It can also display a REPL right in the middle of a workflow. This powerful technique, similar to a breakpoint, allows the workflow developer to troubleshoot and fix bugs faster.
Download vCO-CLI