Eric Sloof - Entries from March 2014

Friday, March 28. 2014

New Book - Virtualizing SQL Server with VMware

For enterprises seeking to drive maximum value out of their IT infrastructures, the next frontier in virtualization is mission-critical applications — especially databases. But squeezing maximum performance out of a virtualized database instance is an art as much as a science.

This indispensable start-to-finish guide brings together all the techniques, tips, and insights you'll need. Drawing on their unsurpassed personal experience, pioneering experts Michael Corey and Jeff Szastak share comprehensive best practices, tips, and insights for deploying mission critical database servers in virtualized vSphere 5 environments. Virtualizing SQL Server 2012 with VMware guides you through the entire project and database lifecycle, including:

Migrating existing SQL Server databases onto a vSphere platform
Baselining your physical system and properly determining resource requirements for a virtualized implementation
Architecting design, storage, memory, and networking for superior performance
Choosing the right hypervisor
Leveraging SQL Server 2012 Availability Groups
Managing and monitoring virtualized database instances and resources

Thursday, March 27. 2014

Thanks for your votes - NTPRO.NL ended up in the top 10

Eric Siebert over at vsphere-land has managed to calculate all the votes and has put together the Top Blog 2014 results. NTPRO.NLhas ended up at place 6 in 2014 top VMware & virtualization blog voting. My website was also chosen as number 3 at "Favorite Independent Blogger". Congratulations go out to all the other bloggers and I want to thank everyone for casting their vote. I promise the keep up the good work. Here's the complete top 10:

Log Insight 2.0 - Beta Is Available

VMware vCenter Log Insight delivers the best real-time log management for VMware environments, with machine learning-based Intelligent Grouping and high performance search, enabling faster troubleshooting and better operational across physical, virtual, and cloud environments. It can analyze terabytes of logs, discover structure in unstructured data, and deliver enterprise-wide visibility via a modern web interface.

What's New in Log Insight 2.0 Beta

Scale-Out with High Availability
5x-10x throughput improvement in Cluster mode
Single UI to query all the data
Proactive Analytics
Machine learning enabled summarization of event types & schema recognition
Smart fields to aid in extraction
Super-Powered Dashboards
Easily add new data filters on the fly
Interact between dashboard widgets
RESTful API for log ingestion
Improved self-monitoring tools
Windows collection agent
Forwards Windows event logs
Monitors & forwards flat log files
Centralized reporting & management

Download Log Insight 2.0-beta

VMware vCenter Log Insight Getting Started Guide

Monday, March 24. 2014

Networking for VMware Administrators - Now Available To Order

Now that virtualization has blurred the lines between networking and servers, many VMware specialists need a stronger understanding of networks than they may have gained in earlier IT roles.

Networking for VMware Administrators fills this crucial knowledge gap. Writing for VMware professionals, Christopher Wahl and Steve Pantol illuminate the core concepts of modern networking, and show how to apply them in designing, configuring, and troubleshooting any virtualized network environment.

Drawing on their extensive experience with a wide range of virtual network environments, the authors address physical networking, switching, storage networking, and several leading virtualization scenarios, including converged infrastructure.

Teaching through relevant examples, they focus on foundational concepts and features that will be valuable for years to come. To support rapid learning and mastery, they present clear learning objectives, questions, problems, a complete glossary, and extensive up-to-date references.

New Book - VMware Horizon Workspace Essentials

The Horizon suite is VMware's end user solution suite. VMware Horizon Workspace allows administrators to virtualize operations systems, applications, and user data, and also delivers modern desktops to end users.

VMware Horizon Workspace is a new type of solution that is commonly referred to as a "Workspace Aggregator” or “Universal Services Broker”.

It delivers a solution that provides end-users with a single point of access to their corporate data, applications, and other IT-resources as well as providing IT administrators with a single point of administration and management.

This book will show you how to deliver a complete user environment based on their entitlement, their location, and the end point device they are connecting with. It will also show you how, from an IT administrator’s perspective, everything can be managed from a single console.

This book starts by introducing the concepts behind Horizon Workspace, how they work, and how they map onto the everyday tasks faced by an IT administrator. It also covers the challenges a user faces in accessing the technology.

It will then look in detail at the different features and functionality offered by Horizon Workspace in delivering against application brokering, data collaboration, and mobility. The book will take you through each one in detail, using illustrations and screenshots with the option to follow in real time to build out your own lab/pilot environment.

You will also be guided through the product capabilities using step-by-step instructions and screenshots of each feature and how to implement it.

Wednesday, March 19. 2014

Create your own diagrams in Microsoft Visio with the Veeam Stencils for VMware

Veeam Software provides a free collection of VMware Visio stencils that can be used by ESX administrators, system integrators and datacenter managers to create their own diagrams in Microsoft Visio 2003, 2007, 2010 or 2013 as part of their VMware deployment and planning.

Use the free Veeam Stencils for Microsoft Visio to create detailed diagrams in reports and gain valuable business insights, improve business process efficiency and customer experience as well as workflow and monitoring capabilities.

Veeam Stencils contains:

ESX and Hyper-V hosts
Datacenters
SCVMM
Local storage, shared storage
LUN
VMs with status sign
NICs

Create detailed diagrams and gain valuable business insights.

New Book - VMware vSphere Resource Management Essentials

vSphere is the flagship suite of Server virtualization, cloud deployment, and management. VMware vSphere comes with features that help you prepare a robust foundation to build virtual environments. You might have an already-built vSphere deployment, but managing the resources of your vSphere environment is crucial in order to save time and improve productivity.

This practical guide provides readers with a high-level understanding of the various components, methodologies and general best practices for maintaining and managing resources in a virtual environment.

Readers will begin the book with an explanation of the requirements for ESXi, the groundwork for VMware vSphere, and move through a comprehensive study of how resources are supplied. We’ll then progress with showing you the characteristics that enable resource and virtual machine availability.

With a solid understanding of the requirements to build and run your environment, you then move on to understanding how ESXi manages resources such as CPU, memory, disk, and networks for multiple virtual machines and how it ensures resource availability. Finally, you will be made aware of the options available with Vmware vSphere to automate and monitor your environment.

Readers will go through a learning curve of understanding the components, identifying the course of action, and putting it to practice.

Monday, March 17. 2014

(Dutch) Video - NLVMUG User Conference 2014 sessie 15 vCenter Operations and the Quest for the missing Metrics

This session will teach you how to customize vCenter Operations to provide you the information you really need for your business. We do this by giving you some real life examples from the field where we use Custom Dashboards, Super Metrics, Adapters and Alerts in order to give you the best possible view into the well-being of your environment. You’ll also see a live demo of third party integration and you'll learn how to monitor the performance of your enterprise to diagnose and prevent problems.

Thursday, March 13. 2014

New Book - DevOps for VMware Administrators

DevOps represents a powerful new approach to delivering IT services, where software developers and IT operations teams work closely together to deploy projects far more often and more reliably.

As pioneers like Google, Amazon, and Netflix have discovered, DevOps can improve efficiency, accelerate delivery, and reduce costs. However, most discussions of DevOps focus on theory rather than implementation, and DevOps raises unique issues in virtualized environments.

DevOps for VMware Administrators addresses these issues, offering realistic insights both for implementing DevOps and for applying new tools to maximize its value. The authors also offer extensive hands-on practice with solving realistic problems and improving IT efficiency by utilizing these four tools:

Puppet IT automation software for managing infrastructure across its lifecycle, including provisioning, configuration, orchestration, and reporting
Chef configuration management tool for writing system configuration "recipes" that streamline server configuration and maintenance and can integrate with cloud-based platforms such as Rackspace and Amazon EC2 to automate provisioning
Ansible, the flexible open source toolkit for automating configuration management and orchestration in Unix and Unix-style environments
Windows PowerShell for automating tasks and configuration management in Windows environments

vSphere PowerCLI 5.5 Release 2 available for download

VMware vSphere PowerCLI provides a Windows Powershell interface to the VMware vSphere and vCloud and the SRM APIs. VMware vSphere PowerCLI includes numerous cmdlets, sample scripts, and a function library. PowerCLI is a command-line and scripting tool built on Windows PowerShell, and provides more than 400 cmdlets for managing and automating vSphere and vCloud.

This release of vSphere PowerCLI introduces a number of new capabilities and expands on the existing cmdlets introducing cmdlets for vCenter Site Recovery Manager and providing further management of the VMware vSphere and VMware vCloud Director products.

Using the Connect-SRMServer and Disconnect-SRMServer you are now able to connect to vCenter SRM and access all public APIs available, use of the $global:DefaultSrmServers object properties and methods after connection allow for access to recovery group and protection group automation.

Sample Scripts for Managing vCenter Site Recovery Manager with VMware vSphere PowerCLI

Protect a Virtual Machine - You can protect a virtual machine by replicating it to a remote SRM site.
Connect-SrmServer - This cmdlet establishes a connection to a vCenter Site Recovery Manager (SRM) server.
Create a Report of the Virtual Machines Associated with All Protection Groups - You can create a simple report containing information about the virtual machines associated with all protection groups.
Create a Report of the Protected Virtual Machines - You can create a simple report containing information about the protected virtual machines associated with an SRM server.

(Page 1 of 3, totaling 21 entries)