VMware - 3

Join VMware's Ben Scheerer diving deeper into the vC Ops capacity planning and management capabilities.

Eric Siebert over at vsphere-land has managed to calculate all the votes and has put together the Top Blog 2012 results. NTPRO.NL has ended up at the third place in the Top VMware Bloggers 2012. My website was also chosen as number one at "Best Videos used in a Blog" and I'm the most "Favorite Independent Blogger" :-) Congratulations go out to all the other bloggers and I want to thank everyone for casting their vote. I promise the keep up the good work.



In this vChat episode (#25) of vChat Eric, David, Simon and special guest John Troyer (VMware) announce the Top 25 Virtualization Blog awards.

Join Kit Colbert in a walkthrough oveview of the VMware vCenter Operations Manager, a component of the vCenter Operations Management Suite. These are the new Features of VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite Editions.

New Operations Management Dashboard provides comprehensive views into health, risk and efficiency scores of your cloud infrastructure. Quickly drill down to see what’s causing current workload conditions, pinpoint potential problems in the future and identify areas with inefficient use of resources.

New Correlation of Performance and Change Events inside the guest operating system enable administrators to quickly understand and remediate performance issues arising from configuration changes.

New Compliance Checking of vSphere Hosts allow administrators to maintain a compliant infrastructure and automated the hardening of vSphere hosts with pre-built security and compliance guidelines.

New Smart Alerts provide pro-active notifications of building health, performance and capacity issues in the environment. Automated root cause analysis identifies the offending metric across all layers of the infrastructure.

New Capacity Planning, Reporting and Optimization views help administrators optimize VM density; identify areas of reclaimable waste and chronic capacity shortfalls. Configurable alerts notify of changing capacity conditions in production and non-production areas.

New Integrated Cost Metering and Reporting capabilities provide visibility into the financial value of consumed resources and enable administrators to optimize provisioned capacity for lowest cost without sacrificing performance.

New Discovery and Visualization of Application and Infrastructure Dependencies bring application-level awareness to infrastructure and operations teams to ensure service levels and disaster recovery protection for all critical application services. Application components and version numbers are named automatically and updated continuously.

Deploy a Corporate Profile on Employee-owned Devices Enforce security and compliance policies. With VMware MVP, a personal profile and a corporate profile can securely and simultaneously run on the same device in isolated containers. Corporate applications and data are securely isolated from an employee’s personal profile. Ease Mobility Management Remotely provision, manage and update corporate profiles in a streamlined manner, irrespective of the mobile device. With VMware MVP, employees can connect their own mobile devices to the corporate network from a corporate profile that is provisioned and managed by the corporate IT group. IT administrator can manage mobile end-points and desktop from a single interface.
Check-out LG Android VMware Horizon Mobile hands-on for more details

The past year has been great. I’ve posted 269 articles at ntpro.nl which have been read by many visitors, got certified for both VCAP-DCA and DCD and VCP5. I’ve also received the vExpert and the VMware Certified Instructor Certificate of Achievement Award. Together with Mattias Sundling, I’ve presented well received sessions at the VMworld in Las Vegas and Copenhagen and also at the Dutch VMUG event. Besides that, I’ve recorded a lot of videos. These videos are available via ITunes and YouTube. This is a list of the 10  most popular videos. 

1.   Configure SNMP for ESX
2.   Using Private VLANs prevent VLAN exhaustion
3.   How to run Android in a VMware Virtual Machine
4.   Migrating from ESX 4.1 to ESXi 5.0
5.   How to deploy the Arista vEOS
6.   vSphere 5 Video - iSCSI User Interface
7.   VKernel Performance Analyzer
8.   The vSphere 5 Web Client
9.   vSphere 5 Video - ESXi Firewall Configuration
10. vSphere 5 Video - Storage DRS

I want to thank all of you, the readers and viewers of my articles and videos for their support and wish everyone a great 2012.

Join Arista and VMware technical leaders as they go in-depth into the new Virtual eXtensible LAN technology -VXLAN.  VXLAN delivers on the ability to execute Stateful Layer-3 vMotion's - the live migration of a workload to any server in the network, at any time, in seconds, regardless of the IP addressing topology of your infrastructure.  VXLAN overcomes the segmentation boundaries and broadcast domain constraints of 802.1q VLANs, replacing them with a more granular and scalable model for segmentation and scaling.  In this session you will learn about VXLAN, the framing format, encapsulation mechanism, how to prepare the network and infrastructure, and how to operate and troubleshoot this environment.

Please register and you will receive a confirmation email reserving your spot in this webinar! 

December 2, 2011 - 10:00am PDT

The ThinApp 4.7 release provides ThinApp integration with Horizon Application Manager, which includes the following features:

The ThinApp Setup Capture wizard includes an option to manage with Horizon Application Manager. When the checkbox is selected, ThinApp checks if the Horizon agent is installed natively on the client and is running. If the Horizon agent is found, the ThinApp package reports to the Horizon agent so that it can be controlled by Horizon Application Manager. Horizon Application Manager entitlement allows the delivery of ThinApp packaged applications to specified users and groups. The Horizon agent authorizes a ThinApp package to open, based on entitlements.

- ThinApp packages are registered by Horizon Application Manager and delivered to end points.
- The administrator can configure an Organizational URL for end points missing the Horizon agent.
- The administrator can track usage of ThinApp packages by using Horizon Application Manager monitoring and reporting.

VMware Pushes ThinApps to the Web
VMware ThinApp 4.7 Whats New
Horizonmanager.com

VMware Horizon Application Manager and ThinApp

In the ThinApp context, Horizon Application Manager provides a centralized administrative view that enables IT personnel to deploy, entitle and manage ThinApp application packages. Implementation of Horizon Application Manager is uncomplicated, and the only changes required in ThinApp is the selection of a check box in the Setup Capture Wizard. Horizon Application Manager checks the Active Directory for ThinApp packages. Currently, only EXE files from ThinApp packages can be managed through Horizon Application Manager.

ThinApp Packages are not stored in Horizon Application Manager, they remain on the network share and are downloaded to the entitled user's machine using BITS technology Each time that a user attempts to run a ThinApp virtual application, the Horizon agent verifies that there is an entitlement for the ThinApp package. If the user is entitled to use the application, the package launches. As long as the user remains entitled to use the application, the application is accessible. If an Administrator removes the entitlement, the Horizon Agent receives that change in entitlement and does not authorize subsequent launches. In addition, the Horizon Agent removes the package from the User Portal and the Horizon folder.

Assuming that a user is connected to the internet, their entitlement is verified every time that they open a virtual application. Because there are situations in which a user might not have internet access while using the application, a user's entitlement to use an application must be authenticated at least every thirty days. If authentication is not completed within this timeframe, the entitlement is withdrawn and the application cannot run. The Horizon Agent must be running on an end user's machine for a virtualized application to run.

VMware Horizon Application Manager is a hosted service that enables organizations to centrally manage the provisioning, access and usage of cloud, software-as-a-service (SaaS) and ThinApp-virtualized Windows applications. This solution enables IT departments to extend on-premises Active Directory identities to the public cloud, simplifying the security of application access. Unlike other federation solutions, Horizon Application Manager does not require an enterprise or public organization to make additional capital investments in complex and expensive hardware.

At its core, Horizon Application Manager includes an identity-as-a-service hub that securely extends a user's existing identity in systems such as Microsoft Active Directory into the cloud. This process simplifies the management of identities across multiple application types that are found in a typical enterprise. This simplification benefits both IT and users by collapsing separate identity silos into a single enterprise identity that can secure user access across private and public cloud resources.

In addition, managers have control over user access policies and are able to track user activity, via usage reports. Following installation, administrative tasks, such as user entitlement, matching Active Directory groups with applications, and so on, can be accessed through a Web portal.

End users open a single sign-on portal from which they have self-service access to the organization's application catalogue. Users can only open the applications to which they are entitled. They can easily move from application to application without having to re-enter their login credentials. Applications can be accessed across a broad
range of devices.

Continue reading "Understanding VMware Horizon Application Manager" »

VMware has announced VXLAN, the Virtual Distributed Layer-2 Network IETF draft standard, of which Arista is a co-author. VXLAN is a special encapsulation mechanism that runs between virtual switches and enables virtual machines to be deployed and moved on or between any server within the network. The main benefits to the IT department in planning to support VXLAN is the ability to deploy a virtual machine on any server within the network, regardless of its IP subnet. This enables the IT department to create a scalable network architecture that supports capacity on demand and workload mobility regardless of geography and IP addressing. VXLAN requires no changes to the underlying IP addressing architecture and should require no major changes to installed infrastructure in the data center.

What is VXLAN?

Virtual eXtensible LAN is a new network encapsulation and segmentation mechanism that enables a VM to be deployed on any server, regardless of the IP subnet the physical ESX host is in. It accomplishes this by encapsulating the MAC and IP packets from the virtual NIC with a UDP header and then using IP multicast to emulate a broadcast domain. To get traffic in and out of this encapsulated 'virtual wire' the non-encapsulated traffic must go through a vShield Edge virtual machine acting as a VXLAN gateway. Performing these elegant L3-transparent migrations with L2-only storage transport technologies like FCoE is impossible.

http://www.aristanetworks.com/media/system/pdf/TechBulletins/VXLAN_Overview.pdf

I invite you to take a look at the 'Fall 2011 Arista Webinar Series' that kicks off at the end of September.  Arista will be joined by top industry partners to reveal the best practices of data centers, one vertical at a time.  Arista Tech Education - For Engineers, By Engineers.

Site Recovery Manager 5.0 provides additional features—vSphere Replication, automatic reprotection and failback, new means of handling dependencies and priorities, and a simpler user interface that you can leverage to extend your disaster recovery plan to cover even more of your business-continuity needs.

This guide provides you with step-by-step instructions on how to set up automated disaster recovery workflows using Site Recovery Manager, as well as information on other cutting-edge DR features in Site Recovery Manager. With Site Recovery Manager, you can design and implement a comprehensive disaster recovery plan for your virtual environment. After going through the evaluation exercises in this guide, you should be able to make the right choice to implement your disaster-recovery solutions in your virtual datacenter.

VMware-vCenter-Site-Recovery-Manager-Evaluation-Guide.pdf

The purpose of this guide is to support a self-guided, hands-on evaluation of SRM by IT professionals who are looking to automate their disaster recovery plans with SRM in their vSphere environment. The VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.0 Evaluation Guide is intended to provide SRM customers and evaluators a guide that walks them through the SRM workflow that must be completed to allow for the successful and automated service failover from the designated SRM protected site to the designated SRM recovery site.