Entries from Eric Sloof

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

VMware AirWatch: On-Premises Deployment equips students with skills needed to install, configure, and upgrade an on-premise AirWatch server. Students access hands-on labs and learn upgrade options and strategies, and how to troubleshoot common installation and upgrade issues. Advanced installation techniques are discussed, including the use of high availability and redundancy. 

 

VMware AirWatch: Cloud Deployment provides students with skills required to configure and provision AirWatch cloud deployments. This course covers the enablement of containerized applications, deployment and management of corporate email, and integration with enterprise resources. Students access hands-on labs and learn best practices for mobile deployment, with specific focus on how to deploy and manage AirWatch applications.

VMware’s Virtual SAN is designed to be simple: simple to configure, and simple to operate. This simplicity masks a sophisticated and powerful storage product. This simplicity hides a lot of the complexities found in most modern day storage systems.


Under the covers, Virtual SAN also has its complexities. While VMware does provide extensive documentation in the form of a Virtual SAN Administrators Guide and Virtual SAN Troubleshooting Reference Manual, there is a desire to continue with the simple approach and highlight, through Health check plugin, the component that may be at fault.



Virtual SAN Health check plugin checks all aspects of a Virtual SAN configuration. It implements a number of checks on hardware compatibility, networking configuration and operations, advanced Virtual SAN configuration options, storage device health as well as virtual machine object health. The health check will provide two main benefits to administrators of Virtual SAN environments:

1. It will give administrators peace of mind that their Virtual SAN deployment is fully supported, functional and operational
2. It will provide immediate indications to a

Download the Virtual SAN Health Check Plugin Guide

Download the Virtual SAN Health Check Plugin

Rawlinson Rivera's blog post

With the growth in size and complexity of vSphere environments, the ability to prevent and recover from storage issues is more important than ever. vSphere HA now includes Virtual Machine Component Protection (VMCP), which provides enhanced protection from All Paths Down (APD) and Permanent Device Loss (PDL) conditions for block (FC, iSCSI, FCoE) and file storage (NFS).

Prior to vSphere 6.0, vSphere HA could not detect APD conditions and had limited ability to detect and remediate PDL conditions. When those conditions occurred, applications were impacted or unavailable longer and administrators had to help resolve the issue.

vSphere VMCP detects APD and PDL conditions on connected storage, generates vCenter alarms, and automatically restarts impacted virtual machines on fully functional hosts. By doing this, it greatly improves the availability of virtual machines and applications without requiring
more effort from administrators.

Virtual SAN is radically simple, hyper-converged storage for virtualized environments. This short video demonstrates the simple, two-click installation and easy configuration steps.