Eric Sloof - Entries from January 2015

Tuesday, January 27. 2015

New Book - Virtualizing Oracle Databases on vSphere

Thousands of organizations are virtualizing large-scale Oracle database systems. But, until now, reliable best practices have been hard to find, and database and virtualization professionals have often brought differing and incompatible perspectives to the challenge.

Now, there's a comprehensive best practice guide reflecting deep understanding of both Oracle and vSphere, and supported by extensive in-the-field experience with the full spectrum of applications and environments.

Combining theory and practice, Virtualizing Oracle Databases on vSphere integrates up-to-date knowledge for the entire lifecycle, including architecture, performance, design, sizing, and high availability.

It focuses on current versions of Oracle and vSphere, while highlighting differences in esx3.5, 4.x and 5.x where relevant. Both a detailed reference and a practical cookbook, it provides reliable answers for:

Anticipating issues associated with virtualizing Oracle databases on vSphere
Architecting, deploying, and operating virtualized Oracle databases
Virtualizing high database workloads
Achieving planned and unplanned high availability
Characterizing workloads and sizing systems
Understanding Oracle VMware licensingManaging, monitoring, and optimizing performance
Provisioning and automation
Backup, recovery, and business continuity
Utilizing official support mechanisms, and more

Virtualizing Oracle Databases on vSphere

Monday, January 26. 2015

DevOps for VMware Administrators available for pre-order

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

Sunday, January 25. 2015

Free e-learning course - vCloud Air Fundamentals

This eLearning course on vCloud Air will provide you a fundamental understanding of vCloud Air and how customers can move or extend their on-premises data center to vCloud Air.

The course provides an overview of vCloud Air, the common challenges with public cloud offerings, common barriers to public cloud adoption, and how vCloud Air helps overcome these barriers.

The course then examines the vCloud Air service offerings and features, security and compliance standards, and networking concepts and services associated with vCloud Air. You will evaluate some use cases to understand how customers can get started with vCloud Air.

Finally, you will identify the various management tools that can be used to manage your vCloud Air environment with your on-premises virtual infrastructure.

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

Explain how vCloud Air helps customers employ a hybrid cloud solution.
Explain vCloud Air networking concepts.
Explain the use of vCloud Air management tools.

Via Marc Huppert

Saturday, January 24. 2015

Running CoreOS on VMware

CoreOS is a new Linux distribution that has been rearchitected to provide features needed to run modern infrastructure stacks.

The strategies and architectures that influence CoreOS allow companies like Google, Facebook and Twitter to run their services at scale with high resilience.

CoreOS is currently in heavy development and actively being tested. These instructions will walk you through running CoreOS on VMware Fusion or ESXi. If you are familiar with another VMware product you can use them as a starting point.

Download CoreOS OVA

CoreOS Quick Start

Thursday, January 22. 2015

New Book: VMware vRealize Operations Performance and Capacity Management

his book is for VMware professionals. This can be a VMware administrator, architect, consultant, engineer, or technical support. You may be working for VMware customers, partners, or VMware itself. You may be an individual contributor or a technical leader.

This book is an intermediate-level book. It assumes you have hands-on experience of vSphere 5.5 and vRealize Operations 6.0, and you are capable of performing some level of performance troubleshooting. You also have good overall knowledge of vCloud Suite, Virtual SAN, Horizon View, and NSX. You should also have some level of knowledge of operating systems, storage, network, disaster recovery, and data center.

This book is also for IT professionals who deal with VMware professionals. As such, there is a wide range of roles, as virtualization and VMware covers many aspects of IT. Depending on your role, certain chapters will be more useful to you.

VMware vRealize Operations Performance and Capacity Management

Latest Fling from VMware Labs - vMaxGuide

vMaxGuide is an Android application which provides the maximum supported configurations of the following vSphere versions:

vSphere 5.5
vSphere 5.1
vSphere 5.0

vMaxGuide also provides a comparative view of components across the three versions of vSphere along with the comparison of virtual Hardware versions of Virtual Machines.

Users can swipe between the different platforms displayed and select the component of interest. The app also provides a message to the user on certain components, marked by [*], which requires certain condition to reach the maximum supported configuration.

Download the vMaxGuide

Wednesday, January 21. 2015

VMware Exam Preparation Workshop: Network Virtualization Certified Professional (VCP-NV)

This 4 hour training course focuses on preparing a candidate to take the VMware Certified Professional – Network Virtualization exam.

The workshop includes an overview of the certification program, tips for preparing for the exam, an in-depth review of each of the objectives on the exam and sample questions broken down in video segments by a VMware Certified Instructor.

By the end of the course, you should be prepared to answer questions based on the following exam objectives:

Describe and differentiate VMware NSX technology and architecture
Explain VMware NSX physical infrastructure requirements and prepare a physical deployment for NSX
Configure and administer vSphere networking components
Install and upgrade VMware NSX
Configure and manage VMware NSX virtual networks
Configure and manage VMware NSX network services
Configure and administer network security
Perform operations tasks in a VMware NSX environment
Troubleshoot a VMware network virtualization implementation

Tuesday, January 20. 2015

Cool Tool - Relax-and-Recover

Relax-and-Recover is a setup-and-forget Linux bare metal disaster recovery solution. It is easy to set up and requires no maintenance so there is no excuse for not using it. Recovery on VMware vSphere is supported so this tool can be used as a P2V migration solution.

&amp;amp;lt;span id=&amp;amp;quot;XinhaEditingPostion&amp;amp;quot;&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;lt;/span&amp;amp;gt;

Go to the Relax-and-Recover website

Friday, January 16. 2015

Get your 365-day License Keys for 9 VMware products

To enable IT professionals to explore VMware technology, VMware User Group (VMUG) and VMware announced today that they are partnering with Kivuto Solutions to provide current and new VMUG Advantage Subscribers with a new EVALExperience offering for selected products.

EVALExperience is an extended product evaluation offering for select products and is exclusively available to VMUG members with a new or current VMUG Advantage Subscription. This member benefit is available at $200 annually as part of the VMUG Advantage Subscription fee.

Go to the EVALExperience

Thursday, January 15. 2015

Free e-learning course - vRealize Operations Manager 6 What's New

This free e-Learning course highlights the new features and enhancements in vRealize Operations Manager 6.0. It also presents use cases that describe how the new features align with customer needs.