Eric Sloof

As x86 server virtualization becomes mainstream for even the most demanding applications, the criticality of managing the heath and efficiency of virtualized environments is more important than ever.

vRealize Operations Manager 6.0 (vROps 6.0) is the key to simplify operations of your virtualized environment and move from being reactive to proactive.

Mastering vRealize Operations Manager 6.0 helps you streamline your processes and customize the environment to suit your needs. You will gain visibility across all devices in the network and retain full control.

With easy-to-follow, step-by-step instructions and support images, you will quickly master the ability to manipulate your data and display it in a way that best suits you and the requirements of your colleagues.

From the new and impressive vROps 6.0 platform architecture to troubleshooting and capacity planning, this book is aimed at ensuring you get the knowledge to manage your virtualized environment as effectively as possible.

Also read: Mastering vRealize Operations. Great book by Scott Norris and Christopher Slater

OpenStack is a framework for delivering cloud services. As a cloud operating system, OpenStack controls large pools of compute, storage, and networking resources throughout a datacenter.

VMware Integrated OpenStack (VIO) is a VMware supported OpenStack distribution that makes it easier for IT to run a production-grade OpenStack-based deployment on top of their existing VMware infrastructure. VIO enables IT admins to quickly and easily deploy and operate a production grade OpenStack cloud while giving developers the standard OpenStack APIs on a reliable platform. 

This e-Learning course provides an overview of the features, architecture, operations, troubleshooting, and management of VIO. This course introduces the learners to the OpenStack project and to the high level features of VIO. It also provides the learners an insight into the architecture, deployment, and consumption of VIO, and demonstrates, at a high-level, how to operate, troubleshoot, and manage VIO.

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

• Describe OpenStack and how the open source project community works
• Describe how OpenStack fits in the VMware Software Defined Data Center (VMware SDDC) vision
• Identify business use cases for OpenStack and VIO
• Analyze how VMware addresses the challenges of deploying, operating, and maintaining OpenStack deployments
• Describe the key features and functions of VIO 
• Describe the architecture of VIO
• Analyze how enterprise-grade features are materialized using VIO
• Demonstrate how VIO can be used to deploy, operate, and maintain cloud environments
• Demonstrate how VIO integrates with vRealize Operations Manager, vRealize Business Manager, and vRealize LogInsight

Ray Heffer, End-User Computing Senior Architect at VMware, presents a technical overview of VMware App Volumes.

Are you the OpenStack advocate at an organization that already uses VMware? Or are you a VMware admin looking to learn more about OpenStack? Either way, this session is for you.

Come learn the latest about: 1) VMware's involvement in the OpenStack community 2) How VMware technologies integrate with OpenStack, and 3) How our customers are being successful leveraging their existing VMware investments and expertise.

A correctly architected and highly available solution provides applications with the largest amount of acceptable operational uptime by countering the impact of unplanned downtime. Although downtime can also be planned—for maintenance and patching, for example—the unplanned outages have the greatest effect on production uptime.



This paper will discuss the requirements of defining high availability forVMware vCenter Server™ on Microsoft Windows and VMware vCenter™ Server Appliance, with recommendations and best practices for providing acceptable levels of protection.

VMware Support Delivery has announced a new series of webinars for our customers. Customers can join these live sessions on Thursdays. There is something for both beginners and more advanced customers. Anyone that is unable to attend the live events will be able to view the recorded versions of the sessions on the Friday of the same week.

Watch this demo to learn how Project Enzo combines the best of workspace delivery, hybrid cloud, and hyper-converged infrastructure to radically transform virtual desktop and application delivery—making it easier and more cost-effective than ever before to adopt, scale, and move desktops and apps on

Last week, Unitrends released a new product -- Unitrends Free.  The product, which is unlimited in terms of VMs and sockets, will allow IT Pro’s to protect 1TB absolutely free, forever.


Features in Unitrends Free include:

• Free vSphere and Hyper-V Backup for Unlimited Virtual Machines (VMs) and Sockets. Unlike other tools that restrict usage by number of VMs or sockets, Unitrends Free provides hypervisor-level protection for up to 1 terabyte (TB) of data.
• Instant VM Recovery. Unitrends Free makes it possible to quickly run a VM directly from a backup to reduce downtime. Instant recovery also allows users to spin up copies of their VMs for recovery verification, testing and development.
• Automated Daily Scheduling. The product features “set it and forget it” scheduling with daily recovery points to keep a user’s system protected at all times – even when no one is around.
• Fast, Incremental Forever Backups. Unitrends Free delivers changed-block tracking and incremental forever backups to ensure that backups complete rapidly every day – without using a lot of storage.
• Cloud Integration. Users can also take advantage of low cost long-term storage via integration with third-party clouds such as Google Cloud Storage, Google Nearline and Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3).
• Unitrends Community Integration. Users benefit from limitless support provided by the Unitrends Community. Directly integrated into the Unitrends Free user interface, IT professionals can search the forum and collaborate to help one another, while also earning attractive rewards.
  
  

Introduced in vSphere 6.0, customers can now use the vCenter Server Watchdog. vCenter Server Watchdog monitors and protects vCenter Server's VPXD providing better availability by periodically checking the vCenter Server processes (PID Watchdog) or the vCenter Server API (API Watchdog).

If the Watchdog service detects that APIs are not running or responding, the Watchdog attempts to restart the service two times; on the third attempt, depending on your configuration, the Watchdog can reboot the vCenter Server's Host OS.

For more information about the Watchdog, see Establishing Watchdog Support in the vCenter Server and Host Management Guide. Watchdog is enabled out of the box for vCenter Server 6.0.

Watchdog monitors and protects vCenter Server services. If any services fail, Watchdog attempts to restart them. If it cannot restart the service because of a host failure, vSphere HA restarts the virtual machine (VM) running the service on a new host.

Watchdog can provide better availability by using vCenter Server processes (PID Watchdog) or the vCenter Server API (API Watchdog). You can use the service start command to start PID Watchdog and the service stop command to stop it.

PID Watchdog monitors only services that are running. After the service is stopped, PID Watchdog does not monitor it. PID Watchdog detects only that a process with the correct executable is in the process table. It does not determine if the process is ready to service requests.

Starting with vSphere 6.x, a Python daemon called API Watchdog checks the status of APIs for the VPXD service. If the APIs are not running, API Watchdog attempts to restart the service two times. If that still does not solve the issue, API Watchdog then reboots the VM.

API Watchdog starts running immediately after deployment of the vCenter Server Appliance. On vCenter Server for Windows, however, you must reboot vCenter Server once before API Watchdog starts working.

API Watchdog generates support bundles before a service restart and also before a VM reboot and these support bundles are stored in C:\ProgramData\VMware\vCenterServer\data\core\*.tgz on vCenter Server for Windows and in /storage/core/*.tgz for vCenter Server Appliance.

Supported vCenter Server high availability options (1024051)

Many enterprises implement server and storage virtualization before tackling the network. But with network virtualization in place, IT can complete a software-defined data center and then reap considerable business benefits in how it manages the overall architecture.

In this free eBook, learn how cloud management and network virtualization, when combined, can deliver:

• Vastly improved provisioning time
• Minimized downtime
• A much more flexible network topology
• Better security in the form of micro-segmentation

Click here to download a free copy of this eBook