Eric Sloof - Entries from February 2015

Thursday, February 26. 2015

Cool Tool - Snapwatcher

Invalid or broken snapshots are caused by all kind of actions the system admin has no control of i. e. backup solutions that trigger the snapshot creation and deletion. If VMware struggles to delete the snapshot files an invalid snapshot is made. This kind of snapshots are known to be hard to detect and tend to grow hidden to waste precious disk space.

Monitor VMware snapshots across VMware vCenter systems and report your efforts saving space.
Track snapshots, find invalid snapshots - leverage the powerful grid to handle hundreds of snapshots smooth and simple.
Free precious disk space wasted by fixing broken, old and invalid snapshots with a click.

Free Download Snapwatcher

Tuesday, February 24. 2015

vSphere 6 Feature Walkthroughs

Explore the features of VMware vSphere 6, the industry-leading server virtualization platform that lets you virtualize applications with confidence.

vCenter Server Install - This series provides to instructions on installing various vCenter 6.0 components.
vCenter Server Upgrades - Seamlessly upgrade from from vCenter Server and vCenter Server 5.x versions to version 6.0 with these walkthroughs.
vSphere Data Protection - With this set of walkthroughs, learn how to perform vital activities that vSphere Data Protection 6.0 enables you to carry out.
vSphere Replication - With these walkthroughs, learn how configure replication and recover a virtual machine.

Friday, February 20. 2015

Maximizing the Use of VMware vRealize Operations for Horizon

VMware vRealize Operations for Horizon, an extension of vRealize Operations Manager for the enterprise, enables you to monitor and troubleshoot a View virtual desktop environment.

This guide introduces you to navigation of the user interface and understanding alerts and events, as well as correct setup of the tool. Specific use cases illustrate how to troubleshoot problems in a View environment, and lab exercises offer guided practice.

This white paper describes how to maximize the use of your vRealize Operations for Horizon monitoring solution and includes use-case scenarios and lab exercises.

Application-Delivery Options in VMware Horizon 6.0

VMware Horizon can deliver applications to users through View, Workspace, or Mirage. Horizon can deliver ThinApp virtual applications, Citrix XenApp published applications, SaaS- and cloud-based applications, natively installed Windows applications, and RDSH-hosted applications.

The wide choice of application-delivery options allows customization for a variety of use cases. This paper gives details on the benefits and use cases for each application-delivery option, along with explanations of how to deliver those applications on each application-delivery platform in Horizon.

Technical white paper: Application-Delivery Options in VMware Horizon 6.0

Wednesday, February 18. 2015

Cool Tool - BaiBoard - Visualize, Create, Collaborate

BaiBoard is the most innovative collaborative drawing application on Mac and iOS platform today. Connected with back-end services on the cloud, BaiBoard enables both consumers and enterprises to collaborate, share, publish, store, retrieve any diagrams.

Note that BaiBoard on iPad has more features than the Mac version, including:

PDF annotation currently only available on iPad.
Saving as stencil feature currently only available on iPad.
Push-to-talk and chat feature currently on available on iPad.

FEATURES:

Real-time, Collaborative, with easy-to-use drawing interface.
Internet based services for collaborating, sharing, storing, viewing with drawing capabilities.
A variety of drawing tools.
Instant snapshots, storing and retrieval any stage of your drawing, all on-demand.
All data (diagrams, chat history, snapshots) of meeting session are persistently stored. Your meetings can be stopped and restarted at any time.
SSL connectivities, Password protected, Encrypted storage.
No registration, No sign-up required.
Collaborate with the BaiBoard iPad version.

Free Download

Thursday, February 12. 2015

Technical Overview - VMware vSphere Replication 6.0

VMware vSphere Replication 6.0 is a virtual machine data protection and disaster recovery solution. It is fully integrated with VMware vCenter Server and VMware vSphere Web Client, providing host-based, asynchronous replication of virtual machines.

vSphere Replication is a proprietary replication engine developed by VMware that is included with VMware vSphere Essentials Plus Kit and higher editions of VMware vSphere, VMware vSphere with Operations Management editions, and VMware vCloud Suite editions.

Technical Overview - VMware vSphere Replication 6.0

Technical Overview - VMware vSphere Data Protection 6.0

Data protection is a key component of any business continuity plan. VMware vSphere Data Protection 6.0 provides an efficient solution for protecting a VMware virtual machine infrastructure.

vSphere Data Protection includes the capability to properly protect mission-critical applications via agents. Backup data can be securely and efficiently replicated to other vSphere Data Protection appliances within the same site and offsite for redundancy and disaster recovery purposes.

vSphere Data Protection can be integrated with EMC Data Domain. Deployment is quick and simple. Administration is easily performed using VMware vSphere Web Client.

Technical Overview - VMware vSphere Data Protection 6.0

Performance Study - Virtualized Hadoop Performance with VMware vSphere 6 on HighPerformance Servers

Large advances have been made in hardware and every level of the software stack since the virtualized Hadoop tests published in April 2013. This paper shows how to take advantage of these advances to achieve maximum performance.

The cluster size remains at 32 two-processor 2U hosts; however, the processor, memory, network and storage capabilities are all roughly doubled from those reported in the earlier paper. The performance of native and several VMware vSphere 6 virtualized configurations were compared using the same TeraSort application suite as before.

It was found that the more powerful hosts give a larger advantage to multi-VM per host configurations: virtualized TeraSort is now up to 12% faster than the optimized native configuration. The apples-to-apples case of a single virtual machine per host again shows performance close to that of native Linux.

The origins of the improvements are examined and recommendations for optimal hardware and software

configurations are given.

Wednesday, February 11. 2015

Latest Fling from VMware Labs - VM Resource and Availability Service

This Fling enables you to perform a what-if analysis for host failures on your infrastructure. You can simulate failure of one or more hosts from a cluster (in vSphere) and identify how many:

VMs would be safely restarted on different hosts
VMs would fail to be restarted on different hosts
VMs would experience performance degradation after restarted on a different host

With this information, you can better plan the placement and configuration of your infrastructure to reduce downtime of your VMs/Services in case of host failures.

Also take a look at: New fling released: VM Resource and Availability Service

Tuesday, February 10. 2015

New Training Course - VMware vRealize Automation: Install, Configure, Manage [V6.2]

This training course focuses on installing, configuring, and managing VMware vRealize Automation.

This course covers the configuration and use of the vRealize Automation platform, including self-service provisioning and the creation of multivendor cloud services.

This class also helps students understand and achieve the benefits of automation as a component of the software-defined data center.

Describe the vRealize Automation architecture and use case in today’s multivendor cloud environments
Install and configure vRealize Automation 6.2
Deploy Distributed Execution Managers and agents for vRealize Automation connectivity
Configure endpoints to support compute fabric connectivity
Manage vRealize Automation 6.2 entities on VMware hardware, third-party hardware, and cloud infrastructures
Configure vRealize Automation infrastructure services
Configure and manage tenants and blueprints
Configure and manage a service catalog
Configure and manage role-based access control
Request and manage machines through the user portal
Analyze and configure vRealize Automation workflows
Integrate VMware vRealize Orchestrator with vRealize Automation
Automate application provisioning with VMware vRealize™ Application Services
Manage and monitor machines and resource reclamation
Manage cost reporting with VMware vRealize Business

VMware vRealize Automation: Install, Configure, Manage [V6.2] course datasheet

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