Eric Sloof

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

After this course, you will be able to:

• Install and configure vCloud Application Director to use with vCloud Automation Center
• Manage the components in the vCloud Application Director catalog
• Configure application blueprints
• Deploy applications
• Manage deployed applications

Sign up today for this two-hour self-paced course.

With this release vCenter Orchestrator introduces a more flexible content delivery mechanism thanks to increased workflow development efficiency, the Dynamic Types concept and out of the box version control system support.

As part of the automation process you are now able to assign key-value tags to an existing workflows. Tags let you attach metadata to existing workflows and make them more searchable and easy to use. Tags let you quickly identify resources based on a logical relation. Later on, you can reference them in a specific automatic remediation case or call a particular workflow based on a tag criteria.

Plug-in development is easier than ever thanks to significant improvements in the vCenter Orchestrator Plug-In SDK. The new Plug-In SDK is distributed as part of the Orchestrator Appliance and exposes a mvn-based context for building the plug-in hierarchy and storing the plug-in dependency. In addition to this, with this release Orchestrator introduces a new plug-in development API exposing easy to use SSL trusted store support and cluster-wide persistence and propagation of plug-in configuration changes. The following plug-ins are now being shipped as part of the vCO 5.5.1 platform - HTTP-REST, SOAP, Active Directory, SNMP, and AMQP.

The vCenter Orchestrator client provides the ability to export existing packages directly into a folder. Once the workflow packages are exported, they can be easily integrated with a version control system and the content can be easily collaborated among the team.

Workflow developers are now able to explore the new Dynamic Types which currently is being shipped with Beta quality. They can easily extend vCenter Orchestrator plug-ins by adding their custom types accessible from the scripting API. New types become available in the inventory right after creation and they could be directly leveraged from the vCAC ASD context as part of the cloud provisioning process and XaaS definition. 

Download vCenter Orchestrator 5.5.1

VMware Virtual SAN is a software-defined storage technology that is available with vSphere 5.5 Update 1 (or later). Virtual SAN is a core component of vSphere that aggregates local server-attached storage (local storage on a vSphere host/server) and provides a datastore that is visible to all hosts within a vSphere cluster. VMware Virtual SAN is optimized for use with Horizon View 5.3.1.

Virtual SAN implements a policy-based approach to storage management. These policies define virtual machine storage requirements, such as capacity, performance, and availability. Storage is provisioned and automatically configured according to these policies.

The above characteristics of the Virtual SAN architecture are highly beneficial to virtual desktop environments that use Horizon View 5.3.1. Further, the architecture supports standard vSphere features that require shared storage, such as HA, vMotion, and DRS. Virtual SAN eliminates the need for an external shared storage infrastructure and simplifies storage configuration and virtual machine provisioning activities.

Learn more at:

• Horizon View 5.3.1 on VMware Virtual SAN - Quick Start Guide (2073795)
• VDI Performance Benchmarking on VMware Virtual SAN 5.5

VMware Virtual SAN is a new software-defined storage tier for VMware vSphere environments. Virtual SAN clusters server disks and flash to create radically simple, high performance, resilient shared storage designed for virtual machines.

The key benefits are:

• Radically simple storage designed for virtual machines
• Hypervisor-converged storage software that creates a high-performance, persistent storage tier
• Significantly reduced TCO by up to 50 percent
• Integrated with VMware stack
• Flash-optimized architecture for compelling price/ performance
• Low upfront investment; grow as you go with granular linear scaling of performance, capacity, and cost
• Rapid storage provisioning and automated, self- tuning ongoing management
• Single pane of glass management with vSphere
• Backed by VMware support and all major server OEMs

• Read VMware vice president and general manager John Gilmartin's blog
• Read VMware Storage and Application Services CTO Richard McDougall's blog
• Test drive VMware Virtual SAN via VMware Hands-on Labs Online
• Learn more about VMware Virtual SAN