Eric Sloof - Entries from August 2014

Monday, August 25. 2014

VMworld TV Interview: Ron Totah of VMware on EVO

Eric Sloof talks with Ron Totah in the EVO Zone at the Solutions Exchange at VMworld US 2014.

VMworld TV Interviews Ben Fathi, VMware CTO

Eric Sloof chats with VMware CTO Ben Fathi at VMworld US 2014!

VMworld TV talks exclusively to Rackspace

Eric Sloof talks exclusively to Rackspace at the VMworld 2014 Solutions Exchange.

4 New EVO:RAIL Technical Videos

VMware EVO: RAIL combines compute, networking, and storage resources into a hyper-converged infrastructure appliance to create a simple, easy to deploy, all-in-one solution offered by VMware qualified partners. The benefits are:

Simplicity Transformed
Software-Defined Building Block
Trusted Foundation
Highly Resilient by Design
Infrastructure at the Speed of Innovation
Freedom of Choice

VMware has released 4 New EVO:RAIL Technical Videos

VMware Introduces vRealize Suite, a Cloud Management Platform – Purpose-Built to Manage Heterogeneous Data Centers and Hybrid Clouds

At VMworld 2014, VMware, Inc. announced VMware vRealize™ Suite, a comprehensive platform for managing the hybrid cloud. The platform combines the capabilities of VMware’s existing cloud automation, cloud operations and cloud business management solutions into a single offering to deliver:

Agility and speed that the business needs to deliver applications and infrastructure quickly
Cost transparency and control that IT requires to ensure application uptime, performance, economics, security and compliance.

VMware vRealize Suite represents the next step in the evolution of VMware’s market leading cloud management family of products – shifting from a product to a platform strategy. By bringing all management products under a single product family, VMware is focused on delivering a platform with a common services model and an integrated interface to help businesses achieve a high level of automation and orchestration.

Read the full paper here

VMware NSX Transforms Networking and Security Operations in the Software-Defined Data Center

At VMworld 2014, VMware, Inc. showcased the continued maturity of the industry’s most complete network virtualization platform for the software-defined data center with the launch of VMware NSX™ 6.1 and the general availability of more than a dozen partner solutions.

VMware NSX adoption is accelerating, driven by the platform’s ability to drive application provisioning times down from months to minutes, and to address fundamental issues with data center security architecture.

VMware NSX delivers security that is built directly into the data center infrastructure,and allows customers to insert advanced partner services to improve threat protection, reduce risk and help customers address their compliance requirements in the software-defined data center. VMware NSX is not only changing the networking paradigm, but is advancing data center security in a way that was previously neither economically nor operationally feasible.

News Facts:

VMware announces the general availability of VMware NSX 6.1, advancing security, scalability and performance for software-defined data centers and the hybrid cloud.
VMware NSX has more than 150 customers and a greater than $100 million annual sales run rate.
VMware NSX customers include four of the top U.S. financial institutions, leading public and private sector enterprises and some of the world’s largest service providers.
VMware NSX is now available through VMware’s reseller channel, and VMware expects to have more than 100 trained partners selling NSX by the end of 2014.
14 ecosystem partners will have generally available products that are interoperable with VMware NSX by the end of Q3 2014.
VMware announced the first 38 recipients of the newly minted VCDX-NV certification. VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) is the highest level of certification offered by VMware, and now includes a special competency focused on network virtualization.
VMware now offers a full schedule of classes for the comprehensive “VMware NSX: Install, Configure, Manage” training course to help networking and IT systems professionals in their career evolution.
VMware has more than 40 break outs sessions about networking and security at VMworld 2014 in San Francisco.

Read the full paper here

VMware Integrated OpenStack Empowers IT to Provide Developers with Open API Access to Enterprise-Class VMware Infrastructure

At VMworld 2014, VMware announced VMware Integrated OpenStack, a solution that will enable IT organizations to quickly and cost-effectively provide developers with open, cloud-style APIs to access VMware infrastructure.

The VMware Integrated OpenStack distribution will leverage VMware’s proven software-defined data center technologies for compute, network, storage and management to provide enterprise-class infrastructure that reduces capital expense (CAPEX), Operational Expense (OPEX) and total cost of ownership for production-grade OpenStack deployments.

News Facts:

The software-defined data center is the ideal architecture for building and operating a private, hybrid or public cloud.
VMware provides the best-in-class infrastructure for building a software-defined data center with OpenStack.
VMware will deliver an OpenStack distribution optimized for VMware virtualization solutions that leverages all of VMware’s software-defined data center components—compute, networking, storage and management—not just the hypervisor, for building enterprise-class OpenStack clouds.
VMware will package, test and support all components of the distribution, including the open source OpenStack code.
VMware is running a qualified beta program for VMware Integrated OpenStack. Interested customers can fill out the sign up page here. VMware Integrated OpenStack is scheduled for general availability in the first half of 2015.
VMware has also partnered with OpenStack distributions including Canonical, HP, Mirantis, Piston, Red Hat and SUSE to make sure those vendors' OpenStack offerings work well with VMware infrastructure.

Read the full paper here

VMware EVO: RAIL Hyper-Converged Infrastructure Appliance

With EVO: RAIL, customers experience a radically new, end-to-end user experience that drives simplicity. EVO: RAIL Deployment, Configuration, and Management streamline initial setup and ongoing operations.

Deployment - EVO: RAIL deployment is simple, with just four steps:

Configure your network (VLANs and top-of-rack switch). Instructions are provided in the EVO: RAIL User Guide.
Rack and cable.
Power on EVO: RAIL.
Connect a laptop to the TOR switch, point your browser to EVO: RAIL, and answer configuration questions.

Within minutes EVO: RAIL is configured and ready to create VMs!

Configuration - EVO: RAIL Configuration has three options: Just Go! or Customize Me! or Upload Configuration File.

With Just Go!, EVO: RAIL automatically configures a default set of IP addresses and hostnames for extremely fast deployment in a green-field scenario. Configure your TOR switch and click the Just Go! button. All you have to create are two passwords.

With Customize Me!, customers can specify the following configuration parameters:

Hostnames for vCenter Server and ESXiTM hosts naming scheme • Networking (IP ranges and/or VLAN ID): ESXi, Virtual SAN, vSphere vMotion®, vCenter Server, VM Networks
Passwords: ESXi hosts and vCenter Server, optional Active Directory authentication
Globals: Time zone; your existing NTP, DNS, and Proxy servers; logging: vCenter Log Insight or third-party syslog server

With Upload Configuration File, an existing json configuration file can be selected and uploaded.

EVO: RAIL implements data services, creates the new ESXi hosts, and configures vCenter Server. The final screen contains the link to EVO: RAIL Management.

Management EVO: RAIL Management provides a dashboard to view all virtual machines and arrange them with sorting and filtering. Users create virtual machines with only a few clicks to select the guest OS, VM size, VLAN, and security options. EVO: RAIL simplifies virtual machine sizing by offering single-click small, medium, and large configurations, as well as single-click security policies.

EVO: RAIL Management revolutionizes live compute management with health monitors for CPU, memory, storage, and VM usage for entire EVO: RAIL clusters, individual appliances, and individual nodes. EVO: RAIL Management streamlines log collection, licensing, and offers language choice for globalization. It also provides notifications and tracks tasks.

EVO: RAIL Management radically simplifies scale-out. Increasing compute, networking, and storage resources is as easy as powering up a new appliance to join an existing EVO: RAIL cluster. EVO: RAIL automatically distributes the configuration to seamlessly add new appliances with zero additional configuration.

EVO: RAIL Management allows users to check for vCenter, ESXi, and EVO: RAIL software upgrades. EVO: RAIL downloads and installs any patches for these VMware products. With a minimum of four independent ESXi hosts in an EVO: RAIL cluster, updates are non-disruptive and require zero downtime.

EVO: RAIL Software

The EVO: RAIL software bundle is fully loaded onto the EVO: RAIL qualified partner’s hardware. This software bundle is comprised of:

EVO: RAIL Deployment, Configuration, and Management • vSphere Enterprise Plus, including ESXi for compute
VMware Virtual SAN for storage
vCenter Server
vCenter Log InsightTM

EVO: RAIL is optimized for the new VMware user as well as for experienced administrators. Minimal IT experience is required to deploy, configure, and manage EVO: RAIL, allowing it to be used where there is limited or no IT staff on-site. As EVO: RAIL utilizes VMware’s core products, administrators can apply existing VMware knowledge, best practices, and processes.

Welcome to VMworld USA!

The VMworld TV crew are back at the biggest and best VMworld to date! Join Jeremy and Eric for daily updates, news, interviews and general awesomeness as they endeavour to bring you everything this amazing convention has to offer.

Thursday, August 21. 2014

Free e-learning course - VMware vCenter Configuration Manager Fundamentals [V5.7]

The enterprise IT environment is dynamic and is always subject to planned and unplanned changes. IT needs a solution that can maintain configuration compliance against internal standards, security best practices, vendor hardening guidelines, and regulatory mandates.

vCenter Configuration Manager delivers capabilities fundamental to ensuring that virtualized and cloud computing environments are properly configured to meet operational, security, and compliance requirements.

This free, self-paced (90 Minutes) eLearning course provides an overview of vCenter Configuration Manager and describes how vCenter Configuration Manager can be used for configuration and compliance management.

Objectives:

At the end of this course, you should be able to perform the following tasks:

Identify capabilities of vCenter Configuration Manager
Identify business use cases for vCenter Configuration Manager
Analyze the core pillars of vCenter Configuration Manager
Use vCenter Configuration Manager to generate reports and enforce specific legal requirements

VMware vCenter Configuration Manager Fundamentals [V5.7]

(Page 4 of 5, totaling 46 entries)

Monday, August 25. 2014

Thursday, August 21. 2014

Recent Entries