Eric Sloof - Entries from May 2014

Sunday, May 18. 2014

Latest Fling from VMware Labs - WebCommander

WebCommander is a set of web applications that help you to do complicated or time consuming tasks easily. Basically anything you want to do to a vSphere VM could be done.

You can use those web applications programmatically from any existing language or framework so long as it may call web service.

For instance, Unified View Setup (UVS) can be used to group Web Commander actions together into an action list, which is repeatable and can use variables and keywords like LASTGOODBUILD.

WebCommander is a way to do this! WebCommander was designed as a framework to wrap your PowerShell and PowerCLI scripts into an easy-to-access web service. Now you can hand off the tasks your users need by simply adding a new script and giving them access to WebCommander.

Thursday, May 15. 2014

Path to the Software Defined Data Center: Virtualize Your Network with VMware NSX

Please join VMware for a complementary, half-day educational event for IT professionals interested in learning about implementing network virtualization within a Software-Defined Data Center to deliver speed and agility.

Session will highlight:

The Software-Defined Data Center approach
Lessons learned from real production customers
Using VMware NSX to deliver never before possible data center security and micro-segmentation
How to deploy VMware NSX over your existing infrastructure
Who should attend?

People who will benefit from attending this session include:

CIO, CTO and General Managers
IT, Infrastructure and Datacenter Managers
Network professionals, including CCIEs
IT Architects
Networking Managers and Administrators
Security Managers and Administrators

Tuesday, May 13. 2014

vCAC Automated Provisioning with VMware NSX Overview

This video explains how VMware vCloud Automation Center discovers, consumes, and provisions VMware security and network services.

vCAC and NSX – Dynamically Configure Application Specific Network Services

Monday, May 12. 2014

VMworld 2014 Voting Catalog is open

VMworld 2014 session voting is open. You will be required to login to your vmworld.com account to participate. If you do not have a vmworld.com account, you can set one up for free. Please vote for my session:

1576 REST API extensibility

The term REST API is heavily used when software or hardware systems need to be connected. If you’re interested in using REST API to automate your enterprise, this session will help. You will learn how to tie all of the VMware vCloud components and third party solutions together by using the REST API.

The REST API extensibility options can be used to tie systems such as VMware vCloud Automation Center and NSX together. By tying such systems together, they are able to communicate with each other which allow the users to gather specific information in different components and be able to automate the execution tasks in different systems.

Agenda

Learn the language
Connect the systems
Get the tools
Gather information
Execute commands

Tie everything together in Orchestrator You will get an overview on how to gather all the information needed to talk to a certain systems. You will also see the tools which are commonly used to execute GET, PUT, POST and DELETE commands.

You will learn how to interpret the outcome of a command by analyzing HTML, XML and JSON. Center Orchestrator plays a central role in the automation of your enterprise. It’s able to interface with VMware products like vCloud Automation Center and NSX but also with other systems like Active Directory, CMDB and Storage Array Networks. With the REST API extensibility you automate tasks and exchange information between different software systems. Automating tasks means more efficiency for your business.

Go to the Voting Catalog

Thursday, May 8. 2014

Upcoming New Book - VMware Network Virtualization: Connectivity for the Software Designed Data Center

Network and data center virtualization offer today's IT organizations immense opportunities to reduce costs, improve agility, and drive business value. But the field is evolving at a breakneck pace: many decision-makers and implementers are struggling to understand and choose among the options now available to them.

This book will cover both the "how" and the "why" of network virtualization. You'll learn how it works, which technologies comprise it, where to find your best opportunities to gain value, and how to leverage it your own enterprise. Replete with use cases and specific examples, VMware Network Virtualization offers unprecedented insight into how network virtualization works in the context of the datacenter. Coverage includes:

The history, evolution, status, and future of Virtual Networking and Software Defined Networks
Prerequisites and preparations for effective network virtualization
Using next-generation data center network design to improve scale, availability, resiliency, and performance
The rise of the virtual data center: reducing equipment and management costs, while improving user experience
Key characteristics of the Software Defined Data Center (SDDC)
Using network virtualization to provide secure, efficient application access across organizations and functions
Migrating workloads without changing IP addresses or networks
VMware technologies for network virtualization: vSphere, vCNS, NVP, CloudStack, vCloud Director and more
Architectural considerations: public/private clouds, IaaS, and hybrid tenancy
Automation and integration opportunities

VMware Network Virtualization: Connectivity for the Software Designed Data Center

Finally Released - VMware vSphere Performance

VMware vSphere Performance: Designing CPU, Memory, Storage, and Networking for Performance-Intensive Workloads - VMware vSphere is the industry's most widely deployed virtualization solution. However, if you improperly deploy vSphere, performance problems occur.

Aimed at VMware administrators and engineers and written by a team of VMware experts, this resource provides guidance on common CPU, memory, storage, and network-related problems. Plus, step-by-step instructions walk you through techniques for solving problems and shed light on possible causes behind the problems.

Divulges troubleshooting methodologies, performance monitoring tools, and techniques and tools for isolating performance problems
Details the necessary steps for handling CPU, memory, storage, and network-related problems
Offers understanding on the interactions between VMware vSphere and CPU, memory, storage, and network

VMware vSphere Performance is the resource you need to diagnose and handle VMware vSphere performance problems, and avoid them in the future.

Thursday, May 1. 2014

Now available as Rough Cut - DevOps for VMware Administrators

The Rough Cuts service from Safari Books 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.

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
For automating tasks and configuration management in Windows environments - Windows PowerShell

Rough Cut - DevOps for VMware Administrators