VMware - 46

Richard Garsthagen over at Run-Virtual.com created some introduction video’s to warm you up for Europe’s virtualization event of the year.

Richard - General Introduction
Carter - Simplifying VMware Automation with PowerShell
Bing - NFS & iSCSI - Performance Characterization
Ashwin - Best Practices for deploying VI3 v3.5 in your environment

 vmSight, the first and leading provider of virtual network intelligence, announced the first report pack release for its product suite. Offering key intelligence data required for IT planning, IT accounting and IT auditing, the report pack consists of easy-to-add templates that enable scheduled reports, approval workflows and alerts within vmSight’s virtual network intelligence product suite, which provides extensive analytics and alerts on all activities within virtual networks. Report Pack Templates Include System Management and HIPAA & PCI Compliance Reports for Virtual Networks.

Introducing ivi - a Java Virtual Interface for VMware, Xen, KVM, and OpenVZ, ivi (pronounced eve-e) stands for Java Virtual Interface and it is a project that aims to create a single, graphical, management interface for all the major virtualization products. ivi is implemented in Java+Swing, so it is truly portable. Currently ivi uses the VI3 SDK to communicate with VI servers and the XenApi to talk to Xen servers. Future plans include adding support for libvirt to allow communication with KVM and OpenVZ, and eventually support for the Common Information Model (CIM) as a way to talk with VMware, Xen, and Microsoft all through one interface.

You can read more about ivi at http://www.lostcreations.com/code/wiki/ivi.

New on vm4all.com Change Reporter for VI 3 : Change auditing is an important process for controlling the management of your virtual environment, to limit unauthorized changes and errors in VI3 inventory. Erroneous and unauthorized changes usually occur every day in organizations in which many IT professionals manage different aspects of virtual infrastructure. Such changes can cause failures and outages in your virtual infrastructure. NetWrix Change Reporter for VMware Infrastructure 3 audits all changes and enforces controlled change management processes across your virtual environment. This freeware tool sends a daily report pointing to every change made to your ESX servers, folders, clusters, resource pools, virtual machines, and their hardware (*), including previous and current ("before" and "after") configuration values.

Quest announced it has completed the acquisition of Vizioncore, a leading provider of disaster recovery and other products for virtual infrastructure management. Initially acquiring a controlling interest in Vizioncore in 2005, Quest broadened its virtualization product portfolio in 2007 with the acquisitions of Invirtus, a provider of virtual machine optimization, conversion and automation products, and Provision Networks, a leader in virtual client and desktop management solutions. Quest has also added industry visionary Scott Herold to the virtualization business as its Lead Architect. “Scott is a recognized expert in the field of virtualization. I look forward to leveraging his unique blend of practical experience, market knowledge, and visionary thinking across the entire virtualization business.�? Scott will Generate new product ideas and enhancements into growing line of virtualization products. He also will review market trends to determine key technologies for integration with existing technologie and perform technical analysis of potential acquisition targets in the virtualization space. The photo was taken by Viktor van den Berg during the TSX 2007 event in Nice where I conducted an interview with Scott about the upcoming VI3: Advanced Technical Design Guide.

Dave Repczynski and his VKernel crew have recently finished up a series of online Chargeback and Cost Visibility workshops with VMware's Expert Sessions and now they're scheduling a bunch of live sessions. If you're interested or know some else that is, just sign up here. The workshops are purely to learn and focus on industry best practices and standards.

Eric Sloof created three new LinkedIn Groups and would like to invite you to join them. If you don’t know what a LinkedIn group is, here is a short explanation : Many professionals advance their careers and business goals by counting on industry and professional groups, alumni organizations, industry conferences and corporate alumni groups to help them make vital new business contacts. The VMware LinkedIn Groups offers extra features stay in touch with one another and discover powerful new business contacts within their groups and beyond.

VMware Virtualization Group

Gavin Barnard over at VMware created the VMware Virtualization Group on LinkedIn. Joining will allow you to find and contact other Virtualization professionals on LinkedIn. This is a VMware led group for virtualization professionals to expand their network of contacts, share idea's and increase market awareness. "A virtual VMworld" Here's the link to Join.


VMware Certified Professional (VCP)

Members of this group have gained the in-depth skills and industry-recognized certification on VMware technology. The VMware Certified Professional Program is designed for everyone who wants to demonstrate their expertise in virtual infrastructure and increase his potential for career advancement. If you are a VCP you can join this group.

VMware Certified Instructor (VCI)

As a VMware certified instructor you can help organisations who want to maximise the benefits of the VMware virtualisation products. Their IT professionals will benefit from attending in-depth, hands-on courses. If you are a VCI you can join this group.

the official Dutch VMUG

The Dutch VMware User Group (VMUG) program is designed to encourage and support the Dutch community of VMware users. If you are a Dutch VMware fan, you can use this link to join the group.

Thorbjørn Donbæk  a Senior Storage Developer at VMware  created a real cool presentation about ESX Storage Performance Tips. He has worked in the ESX storage group for VMware since November 2001 and enjoys OS level work and particularly in the storage area. Thorbjørn holds a master degree in computer science from the University of Aarhus in Denmark where he also currently lives. His presentation  concludes with:

Create VM-specific RDM LUN’s for heavy sequential workloads. For optimal performance create the LUN in it’s own storage group, otherwise let it share a group with other pure sequential workloads. If the VM has several I/O streams make sure you split out the streams to different LUNs whenever possible E.g. don’t let a database log volume AND the database itself reside on the same physical LUN (or storage group). Many random workloads can be put on the same VMFS as long as ‘performance allows’ Also, mixing sequential and random workloads on the same VMFS but on different ESX servers won’t help anything – it just moves the problem back to the storage.

The presentation can be downloaded from the Denmark VMware user group website.

Come see how simple and powerful automating your VMware Virtual Infrastructure can be with the VI Toolkit for Windows. In this VMworld 2008 EUROPE hands-on lab you'll get first-hand experience with VMware's new PowerShell interface. The lab contains an introduction to PowerShell followed by an overview of the toolkit's capabilities. Then you get to try the toolkit for yourself in a highly realistic environment. Choose from over 15 useful, real-world exercises, ranked from Beginner to Advanced, and including full solutions for you to keep. When you're done you'll be ready to manage your Virtual Infrastructure more efficiently than ever before.

Since Thinstall is acquired by VMware I was wondering what Thinstall’s advice for a virtual  SetupCapture server  would be and found the following how to : When creating a Thinstall project using SetupCapture, they recommend using a "clean" install of Windows. If you don't already have a clean PC sitting around for this purpose, they recommend using a product like VMWare to maintain a clean image of Windows.  With VMWare, you can install Windows into a virtual machine one time and take a "snapshot" of the entire machine in its clean state (no application installed). Then after you have used Thinstall's Setup Capture application to capture an application's install, you can use VMWare to discard your changes and revert the virtual machine to a clean state where it is ready to capture a new application.  The guide shows how to install and configure VMWare Server with a base clean OS. As of this writing, VMWare Server is available for free from VMWare. MSDN subscribers can also obtain a free license to a similar product from Microsoft called VirtualPC. They recommend VMWare over VirtualPC if you have a choice in selection....