HOT-NEWS | PARTNER | FEATURED-ARTICLE | SECURITY-ADVISORIES | PATCH-NOTIFICATION | PRESS-RELEASES | TWEETS | TRAINING | WEBCASTS | TAM | TV | VFABRIC |VCLOUD | SECURITY | EUC | VSPHERE | BCA | LABS | OFFICIAL-BLOGS | EXTERNAL-BLOGS |VMUG | EDUCATION | SUPPORT | KB-ARTICLES |
From the editors Virtual Desk
Hi everyone, I hope that you enjoyed last week’s newsletter. We only have a few more weeks to go in 2012 and the newsletter. As you receive this it will be December and this will be the last newsletter until January. The newsletter also deserves a break I suppose so annual leave it is for our newsletter. This is the 42nd newsletter for the year. Last year we did 39 and around 42 each for 2009 and 2010 so over the past years I have delivered around 160 individual newsletters to my newsletter readers. I plan on keeping to this schedule and in 2013 expect more of the same.
Of course you are welcome to send me any feedback and I will try and ensure that it is included in the newsletter. The newsletter of course is for you.
I wanted to give you a bit of info on how this newsletter is put together as we are at the end of another year. Each week I collect the most intersting and newsworthy information I can find all over the internet relating to VMware. I have a nuch of favourite blogs that I use as well as official VMware blogs (I am always looking for suggestions on others so please send them). I then take all of this information and create from scratch each week a brand new newsletter for you. The news that I put in is all public and I try and do my best to not repeat news and pick only information that I think is relevant for my readers and the community in general. The newsletter can take around 4 hours to put together in total and is then delivered as close to Sunday night or Monday as possible so that you are able to get a weekly read on Monday morning with your favourite brew when you get into the office.
I want to take the opportunity to thank my readers, without you there would be no point in doing this. I want to thank the bloggers out there, you guys rock and without you there would be no content for the newsletter. I also want to thank all of my colleagues at VMware who either deliver the newsletter to their customers as is or customized for their region.
Next week is my birthday and by the time the newsletter comes back on line in mid January I will be celebrating 4 years at VMware.
Of course in the middle of all of this we have the wonderful festive season, I would like to take the opportunity to wish you a safe, happy and healthy festive season wherever you are in the world.
Thank you for reading the newsletter and I look forward to speaking to everyone again next year.
Best Wishes
Neil Isserow (Newsletter Editor)
Queensland Technical Account Manager
Newsletter Archive: communities.vmware.com/blogs/vmwaretam
HOME : #HOT-NEWS
- vCops 5.6 arrives
- VIN 2.0 is generally available
- TAM Day 2012 Brisbane Wrap Up
HOME : #PARTNER
Questions on VMware vCloud Suite?
Do you still have questions about the VMware vCloud Suite? We will be taking your questions via the VMware Partner Network social media channels from Monday, November 26 – Wednesday, November 28 and our resident vCloud Suite expert, Neal Mueller, Infrastructure Product Marketing Manager, will answer your questions via video on Thursday, November 29. His responses will be added directly to your comment chain and the Power of Partnership Blog will host a round-up of all the questions and answers to view in one place.
Questions on VMware vCloud Suite Answered
Earlier this week we asked you to submit questions on the VMware vCloud Suite using the VMware Partner Network social media channels. We received a few really great questions that our resident vCloud Suite expert, Neal Mueller, Infrastructure Product Marketing Manager has answered via video. Below is a playlist of the top four questions.
HOME : #FEATURED-ARTICLE
TAM Day Brisbane 2012 Wrap Up
VMware TAM Program Blog 1/12/12 10:42 AM Neil Isserow TAM-APJ Uncategorized events tam TAM Day
Each year in Brisbane, Australia we host an event for our TAM customers to present to them the newest VMware solutions and thank them from the TAM program. This year we had another fantastic event in Brisbane with all of our customers represented. The participants were all kept well fed and hydrated with coffee, tea and cold drinks throughout the day as well as a fantastic lunch and chocolates and sweets to keep the sugar levels up.
When the event was over we asked our customers to rate the event and we had the highest rating we have received in the 4 years of running this event a 4.69 out of 5 rating which we are very proud of. We also gave a way a bunch of prizes including a seat on a VMware course, an iPad, a VMware T-Shirt and a movie gift voucher, all of which were enthusiastically received.
I look forward to the event again next year, thanks to all the presenters, our sponsors for the venue and of course our TAM customers, without you, well I wouldn’t have a job
Neil Isserow – TAM (Brisbane, Queensland, Australia)
Event Pictures: https://www.icloud.com/journal/#4;CAEQARoQMWh_KLMbpOBuPyIquTfrnw;53AB1285-0C9F-4B30-8A3A-28E786CA8D22
HOME : #SECURITY-ADVISORIES
November 15, 2012 VMSA-2012-0016
VMSA-2012-0016
VMware security updates for vSphere API and ESX Service Console
[more]
November 08, 2012 VMSA-2012-0015
VMware Hosted Products and OVF Tool address security issues
: #PATCH-NOTIFICATION
VMware vCenter 4.0 Update 4a Patch is available for download at:
https://my.vmware.com/web/vmware/info/slug/datacenter_cloud_infrastructure/vmware_vsphere/4_0
HOME :
#PRESS-RELEASES
· November 29, 2012
VMware Announces Authorization of Stock Repurchase Program
· November 15, 2012
Hitachi and VMware Expand Strategic Partnership
: #TWEETS
(@VMWARETAM)
Over 160 TAM newsletters over the past 4 years, 159 online now and archived at:
http://communities.vmware.com/blogs/vmwaretam
If I was a storage array I think a cool idea for a T-shirt would be "The SRA made me do it!"
[New Post] vCNS Edge Gateway re-sizing Compact/Large/X-Large
HOW TO: Tag and Configure a storage device as a Solid State Disk (
#SSD ) in
#vSphere 5. ...:
SpringSource, Inc.@SpringSource
New SpringOne2GX 2012 sessions from Web Track: IoC in
#JavaScript and
#REST -ful API Design with Spring 3
: #TRAINING-SCHEDULE
| Course | Date | Register |
HOME :
#WEBCASTS
How do Today's Cloud Vendors Measure Up?
December 5th 2012 9:00 AM Pacific Standard Time (GMT -08:00, San Francisco)
December 11th 2012 9:00 AM Pacific Standard Time (GMT -08:00, San Francisco)
Choosing the Best VMware vSphere edition for your IT Infrastructure
December 12th 2012 9:00 AM Pacific Standard Time (GMT -08:00, San Francisco)
Com a VMware, Virtualizar Ficou Mais Fácil do que Nunca
December 12th 2012 9:00 AM Pacific Standard Time (GMT -08:00, San Francisco)
Improving the Management of Federal Environments with VMware vCenter Operations Manager
December 13th 2012 9:00 AM Pacific Standard Time (GMT -08:00, San Francisco)
Best Practices for Virtualizing Oracle: Performance and Availability
December 19th 2012 9:00 AM Pacific Standard Time (GMT -08:00, San Francisco)
: #TAM
Each year in Brisbane, Australia we host an event for our TAM customers to present to them the newest VMware solutions and thank them from the TAM program. This year we had another fantastic event in Brisbane with all of our customers represented. The participants were all kept well fed and hydrated with coffee, tea and cold drinks throughout the day as well as a fantastic lunch and chocolates and sweets to keep the sugar levels up.
: #TV
VMware Support Insider: Installing the vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager server
VMwareTV: IBM PureFlex with VMware vSphere 5.1
VMwareTV: VMware vFabric Administration Server (VAS) to provision vFabric tc Server
HOME :
#VFABRIC
Introducing Spring Migration Analyzer
It's my pleasure to announce that we've released the first milestone of Spring Migration Analyzer (SMA), a command-line utility that analyzes enterprise Java applications and produces a report describing the application and how it can be migrated to Spring. Why migrate an application to Spring? We see two main reasons when people choose to use Read more...
We are pleased to announce version 3.0 of RabbitMQ!
This release introduces dynamic, policy-based control of mirroring and federation, improves the user friendliness of clustering, adds support for per-message TTL, introduces plugins for web-STOMP and MQTT, and adds many smaller new features and bug fixes.
Map-Reduce Style: Data Aware Distributed Querying in vFabric GemFire
Big, fast data is powering some of the
most interesting computing opportunities in today’s market. But in order to get there, we need to change our approach to the data tier. Enterprises are trying to move from costly mainframe architectures to virtualized datacenters and utilize commodity hardware more efficiently. With the data tier, this means an architecture that scales horizontally by adding more commodity-based computing and storage at runtime.
Upcoming Webinar: Going In-Memory with VMware vFabric GemFire 7.0 and Spring
Social media, mobile devices, and an ever-expanding commercial world wide web have transformed our culture to an always-on, always-connected, and increasingly impatient creatures. As a result, how applications deal with data management is probably the area of computing that has undergone the most change in recent years. It’s undergoing a renaissance, if you will.
Free Event in London on Dec 6th: Automate Provisioning of Spring Apps to EC2 & VMware vCloud
If you missed it at
SpringOne 2GX, VMware’s David Winterfeldt will be presenting “
Automated Provisioning of Spring Apps to EC2 & VMware vCloud” for free at Skills Matter on December 6
that 18:30PM. It’s location is the
: #VCLOUD
Another VMware Cloud – Experian Runs Its Private Cloud on VMware
According to David Janusz, IT Architect at Experian,
“Implementing infrastructure-as-a-service through VMware vCloud is the next phase in the evolution of virtualization technology. This technology puts even more of the power of virtualization into the hands of VMware customers, and it does so with intelligence and ease.” Whereas the provisioning of development resources could take as long as 11 weeks, virtualization can trim this cycle to a matter of days. VMware vCloud, in many cases, can cut provisioning time even further, to mere minutes.
: #SECURITY
: #EUC
VMware ThinApp Blog: The . . . Definitive Guide for VMware ThinApp
Over the last four years I’ve been working with customers and partners on articulating and demonstrating the value of VMware ThinApp. While ThinApp does offer one of the most flexible and streamlined solutions for virtualizing Windows applications there are still times when you need to put the product knowledge and the application expert together to get the results you want. That has now occurred in written (and ebook) form with the release of the
definitive guide for VMware ThinApp. The title, VMware ThinApp Essentials, much like the author, is understated as you will find the relevance of this book greatly exceeds the ‘essentials’. Yes, the author is one of our own VMware employees, but see for yourself that Peter Bjork always speaks to the reality of the customer environment and the satisfaction of well-implemented technology. Leverage Peter’s dedication to the technology, wide spectrum of application experience, and commitment to help you extract the most value out of your investment in application virtualization.
VMware ThinApp Blog: Using Horizon Application Manager to update ThinApp packages.
Deploying ThinApps with the help of VMware Horizon Application Manager is a great method, but what about updating? Horizon supports updating ThinApp packages and this blog post will walk you through one method of doing that.
Using Horizon Application Manager to update ThinApp packages.
Deploying ThinApps with the help of VMware Horizon Application Manager is a great method, but what about updating? Horizon supports updating ThinApp packages and this blog post will walk you through one method of doing that.
: #VSPHERE
Manage the vCloud Suite vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) 5.1 from the vSphere Web Client
With the vSphere Web Client being the current and future client user interface for vCenter Server managed objects and resources, I thought it would be a good idea to show folks how to enable the vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) 5.1 Manager plug-in to the new vSphere Web Client. In most cases I see that VSA customers tend to manage their VSA based infrastructures from the C# based vSphere Client (Thick Client). With the new capabilities of the vSphere Web Client, the use of the vSphere C# client to manage the VSA based infrastructures is no longer a requirement.
Automating CA Self-Signed Certificates for ESXi 5.1 for use with resxtop
Last week I wrote an article about
resxtop failing to connect to an ESXi 5.1 host due to SSL Certificate validation which has been implemented in resxtop and I provided a few workarounds that you can use until a fix is released for resxtop. As promised at the end of that article, I will show you how you can automate the creation proper certificates for environments using CA self-signed SSL Certificates so you can continue using resxtop with ESXi 5.1 until a fix is released.
Load Balancing using vCloud Networking and Security 5.1 Edge
VMware vCloud Networking and Security Edge is part of the vCloud Networking and Security solution and provides network edge security and gateway services such as DHCP, VPN, NAT, Firewall and Load Balancing. Edge provides load balancing for TCP, HTTP, and HTTPS traffic. Edge maps an IP address to a set of backend servers for load balancing. In this blog, I am going to show step-by-step configuration illustrating how easy it is to deploy and configure load balancing using Edge.
Configuring SNMP v1/v2c/v3 Using ESXCLI 5.1
In previous releases of ESXi, only SNMP v1 and v2c was supported on the host. With the latest release of ESXi 5.1, we now have added support for SNMPv3 which provides additional security when collecting data from the ESXi host. You also have the ability to specify where to source hardware alerts using either
IPMI sensors (as used by previous release of ESXi) or
CIM indicators.You can also filter out specific traps you do not wish to send to your SNMP management server.
Is vSphere Replication storage agnostic even when using SRM?
In short: Yes, it sure is!
In this post I’ll show 6 VMs being protected with vSphere Replication. 2 VMs each will reside on fibre channel data stores (EMC CX4), iSCSI data stores (Falconstor NSS Gateway), and an NFS datastore (EMC VNX5500). I’ll replicate them onto different datastores, fail them over, reprotect, and fallback.
Updated VMFS Whitepaper now available
A new version of the
VMFS Technical Overview and Best Practices white paper is now available. It has been updated for vSphere 5.x & VMFS5. You can download the paper from the VMware Technical Resources web site
here. This new paper has been updated with VMFS5 limits, and also includes discussions around interoperability with newer vSphere features. It also has updated information around when and where to use Raw Device Mappings (RDMs), a feature which has seens it requirements change over the years.
VMware vSphere Data Protection (VDP) Error and Time Synchronization
Using vSphere Data Protection (VDP), I have seen the following error a few times and it has appeared in forums so I thought it would make sense to post a short article on it.
“The most recent request has been rejected by the server. The most common cause for this error is that the times on the VDP appliance and your SSO server are not in sync.”
: #LABS
labs.vmware.com
VMware Academic Program Fall 2012 Update
This fall VMAP has been busy working on extending our program and drafting our plan for 2013 and beyond. The program continues to grow areas such as licensing, research collaborations, and conference attendance. VMAP is building out technology initiatives and expanding our presence globally.
HOME : #BUSINESS CRITICAL APPLICATION (BCA)
Benefit 7: Lowest App Cost of Ownership with vSphere 5
Much like owning a car, there is more to the cost of ownership than the sticker price. The car’s fuel efficiency, maintenance costs, and overall reliability can have a large impact on the owner’s wallet. A better way to assess the economic value of various virtualization platforms is to look at the total cost of ownership (TCO).
There are no issues with virtualizing Oracle, however customers are sometimes given information by Oracle that appears to contradict Oracle’s licensing agreements. For processor-based licenses, Oracle expects to be paid for any hardware that runs Oracle software. Customers that run Oracle software on more servers than they originally planned to (whether those servers are physical or virtual) can expect Oracle to request payment for the additional use. On the other hand, licenses on older, slower machines, or on machines that are used at less than 15% of their capability, need licenses that cost the same as a heavily used server. Customers typically benefit by consolidating Oracle workloads to a smaller number of high-performance servers and paying for fewer core licenses.
SQL is one of the most widely deployed database platforms in the world, with many organizations having dozens or even hundreds of instances deployed in their environments. In SQL Server 2012, vMotion of SQL workloads is unlimited with Software Assurance (SA) and prohibited without SA (i.e. customer must license the origin and target host to accommodate the vMotion). In SQL 2008, vMotion of SQL workloads is unlimited with SA and limited to once every 90 days without SA. This limitation is a Microsoft licensing limitation, not a technical limitation.
SAP announced today that VMware vSphere is now supported and is the preferred way to virtualize SAP’s high performance HANA database. This is great news for customers of both VMware and SAP and opens new options for deployment and management of HANA. This new announcement follows the 2011 announcement by SAP and VMware that virtualization is a best practice for running SAP and that VMware is the preferred virtualization partner to deploy SAP applications for x86. It demonstrates the strong partnership between the companies and their desire to offer customers compelling solutions by supporting the combination of their leading edge software.
SAP and VMware are collaborating to provide customers with modern scalable, flexible infrastructure solutions with automated management tools, services, and support to accelerate the Journey to Cloud Computing. For example, vSphere is the only integrated hypervisor in the new release of Landscape Virtualization Management, SAP’s tool for virtualization and infrastructure as a service. Customers with SAP NetWeaver benefit from an “on-demand” IT environment with a number of benefits:
Update on Virtualizing Sharepoint
Because SharePoint encourages rapid growth and “viral” proliferation, user goals may conflict with the ability of the IT staff to deliver the desired services when needed within budgetary and manpower constraints. Flexibility is extremely valuable during this early period. If rapid growth and evolution can be supported at realistic costs, SharePoint can become an important tool to rapidly increase everyday productivity. vSphere facilitates this capability, allowing organizations to leverage the benefits of SharePoint on a pay-as-you-go basis. Because high availability features are inherent to the vSphere platform, these can be leveraged on demand. By virtualizing SharePoint, the common problems of deploying a complex, high-growth IT service are alleviated, allowing resources to be spent on maximizing the value of the tool in routine business practice.
Whether a custom Java application or third-party vendor application, all virtualize relatively easily. Often our customers notice improvements in performance and scalability when moving to a virtualized platform. Java application clusters are known to contain many instances that require increased managment when on a physical infrastructure. Many of our customers look for consolidation opportunities while improving performance and scalability. The prime reason for virtualizing Java applications these days is the ability to reduce the JVM instance sprawl that many administrators dread—and have to consolidate through virtualization in order to keep the scale manageable and feasible. Many of our customers have virtualized IBM WebSphere, Oracle WebLogic, JBoss, and Tomcat. In the last three years, virtualization of Java applications has become mainstream, as seen with many of our customer accounts.
Hadoop is a modern application with features such as consolidation of jobs and HA that overlap with capabilities enabled by virtualization. This leads some to believe there is no motivation for virtualizing Hadoop; however, there are a variety of reasons for doing so. Some of these are:
Support Statements for Running Business Critical Applications on vSphere
Driving Down Database TCO with VMware Data Director and SAP-Sybase ASE
A recent
IDC study concluded SAP-Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) has the lowest total cost of ownership compared to other relational database management systems (RDBMS). The study found ASE required 27% less processing power and servers than other RDBMS.VMware found ASE’s threaded architected to be equally efficient when running on VMware vSphere. Our
validation testing showed ASE performance, when virtualized, is often equal that of identical physical systems.
: #OFFICIAL-BLOGS
: OFFICIAL-BLOGS
A recent IDC study
concluded SAP-Sybase Adaptive Server Enterprise (ASE) has the lowest total cost of ownership compared to other relational database management systems (RDBMS). The study found ASE required 27% less processing power and servers than other RDBMS.VMware found ASE’s threaded architected to be equally efficient when running on VMware vSphere. Our validation testing
showed ASE performance, when virtualized, is often equal that of identical physical systems.
VMware Accelerate: Application Relocation and Virtualization of Business Critical Applications
Sandy was a reminder. As Hurricane Sandy ravaged the Eastern seaboard of the United States, it brought devastation and human suffering across 15 states. The storm’s destruction flickered across the digital world as well, causing flooding in some of the major data centers, including those in lower Manhattan. As a result, it brought down a number of high-profile web sites and critical applications.
Office of the CTO Blogs: IT as a strategic weapon, rather than a necessary evil
There seem to me to be two types of IT organization – one that has a leader who reports to the CFO, and one where the leader reports to the business or directly to the board. When reporting to the CFO, IT is generally seen as a necessary evil because it’s part of the cost of doing business and a cost that must be reduced – a strong theme in IT throughout the last few years! But when IT reports to the business or board, I’m seeing some exciting things happening in our industry – because these are the organisations that view IT as a weapon for their business and one that can directly affect the performance of the business for the better.
As the industry standard for virtualization, vSphere has received strong ISV support from 18,000 ISVs, including support statements from the four largest ISVs: Microsoft, IBM, SAP, and Oracle (Source: VMware customer surveys, Jan 2010 and June 2011.)
VMware Hands On Labs Blog: Hands on Labs Online Public Beta Update
Folks,
We wanted to keep everyone in the loop on our progress and as always look for your feedback.
Beta Users:
We have started adding folks that have registered for our beta and have currently hit our first milestone of 500 registered users. THANK YOU. We will continue to add more folks but waiting for a few changes coming in the next few hours to ensure the portal is running like a top.
vCloud Architecture Toolkit Blog: Re: Working with the vCloud Networking and Security API
In vCAT 3.0 we discuss many of the vCloud Networking and Security components as well as aspects of design principals and best practices to follow. In this blog we take this one step further and show you how to get started with the very powerful and feature rich vCloud Networking and Security API. I will also show you one very important, but overlooked aspect, which is how to interpret the XML data of the Edge device for example, which can be daunting and very hard to read as it is currently enumerated and presented.
VMware Technical Communications Video Blog: VXLAN Virtual Wires, Part One, Overview
VMware Technical Communications Video Blog: VXLAN Virtual Wires, Part two, Creating Virtual Wires
R&D Manager Sachin Thakkar shows you how to prepare your physical network for VXLAN virtual wires and then takes you through the procedure of creating a VXLAN virtual wire.
: #EXTERNAL-BLOGS
Free vCenter Operations Manager General Available
vCenter Operations Manager Foundation will give you insights and visibility into performance and health of your vSphere infrastructure and is now included free with VMware vSphere. VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite provides automated operations management using patented analytics and an integrated approach to performance, capacity and configuration management.
Free e-learning course - vSphere Data Protection and Recovery Fundamentals [V5.1]
The vSphere Data Protection and Recovery course
provides information about vSphere Storage APIs and the Data Recovery backup and recovery solution for virtual machines and describes the technologies used by Data Recovery. The course
consists of the following self-paced modules:
Free e-learning course - VMware vCloud Director Fundamentals [V5.1]
The
VMware vCloud Director Fundamentals [V5.1] self-paced course introduces students to the components, architecture, functions, and benefits of vCloud Director.
consists of the following self-paced modules:
A Daemon's VIB - Part 3 (Building a software package for VMware ESXi)
Part 3: Packaging, SecPolicy and VisorFS
This is the third and last part of the "Daemon's VIB" series about building a software package for ESXi, using the example of the
ProFTPD Offline Bundle that I recently released. In the
first part I explained how to get (or create yourself) suitable binaries for ESXi, in the
second part we cared about the Daemon's configuration, firewall settings and automatic startup.
Launching The VMware View Client With Google Chrome Using A URI Link
version 1.6 and above can be launched by using a URI
. So for example if you click the following URI the VMware View Client can be launched automatically logging you into your View desktop. vmware-view://view.mycompany.com/Primary%20Desktop?action=start-session
Technical White Paper - VMware vSphere Storage APIs Array Integration (VAAI)
In a virtualized environment, storage operations traditionally have been expensive from a resource perspective. Functions such as cloning and snapshots can be performed more efficiently by the storage device than by the host. VMware vSphere® Storage APIs – Array Integration (VAAI), also referred to as hardware acceleration or hardware offload APIs, are a set of APIs to enable communication between VMware vSphere ESXi™ hosts and storage devices. The APIs define a set of “storage primitives” that enable the ESXi host to offload certain storage operations to the array, which reduces resource overhead on the ESXi hosts and can significantly improve performance for storage-intensive operations such as storage cloning, zeroing, and so on. The goal of VAAI is to help storage vendors provide hardware assistance to speed up VMware® I/O operations that are more efficiently accomplished in the storage hardware.
Quick Host Memory Stats with PowerCLI
One thing I noticed lately is there really isn’t an easy or quick way to check out what the current memory statistics are for hosts. Sure you could look at the Summary page for a single host.
Great vSphere 5.1 Upgrades KB’s & Articles
A few of my fellow TAM’s put together this list of great KB’s / Articles that may help you in the process of upgrading to vSphere 5.1 – Enjoy! vCenter 5.1: #Deploying an OVF fails on vCenter Server 5.1 when VMware tools are installed (2034422) #Installing or upgrading vCenter Server 5.1 fails with the error: [...]
vMotion – VMware Storage vMotion and Enhanced vMotion
vMotion, Enhanced vMotion and Storage vMotion – which one does what and how?
vMotion is one of the best features when it comes to VMware and it’s virtualization technology. With the latest vSphere 5.1 version, an additional - enhanced vMotion has been added to the long list of features that keeps VMware ahead of the competition. So not only “standard” vMotion, storage vMotion, but also enhanced vMotion are the part of the latest vSphere 5.1 suite.
Don’t be a dumbass, check the VMware Compatibility Guides!
Too often I read upgrade plans or visit sites with plans to upgrade VMware products or buy new hosts and notice that the VMware Compatibility Guides have never been checked when making plans. First thing I always do when changing big parts in a virtual infrastructure is to dive into the compatibility guides to check if there are any issues that might occur. Too often there are small things to think about that could ruin your upgrade if you don’t plan well.
VMware View Agent Direct-Connection Plugin NAT/PNAT
Since my article “VMware View Agent Direct-Connection Plugin Explained” I have received several questions about the use of the plug-in with NAT/PNAT. Most of the questions came from VMware employees, but also from partners.
Technical White Paper - VMware vSphere VMFS Technical Overview and Best Practices
VMware vSphere VMFS is a high-performance cluster file system (CFS) that enables virtualization to scale beyond the boundaries of a single system. Designed, constructed and optimized for the virtual infrastructure, VMFS increases resource utilization by providing multiple virtual machines with shared access to a consolidated pool of clustered storage. And it offers the foundation for virtualization spanning multiple servers, enabling services such as virtual machine snapshots, VMware vSphere Thin Provisioning, VMware vSphere vMotion, VMware vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (vSphere DRS), VMware vSphere High Availability (vSphere HA), VMware vSphere Storage DRS and VMware vSphere Storage vMotion.
The . . . Definitive Guide for VMware ThinApp
Over the last four years I’ve been working with customers and partners on articulating and demonstrating the value of VMware ThinApp. While ThinApp does offer one of the most flexible and streamlined solutions for virtualizing Windows applications there are still times when you need to put the product knowledge and the application expert together to get the results you want. That has now occurred in written (and ebook) form with the release of the definitive guide for VMware ThinApp. The title, VMware ThinApp Essentials, much like the author, is understated as you will find the relevance of this book greatly exceeds the ‘essentials’. Yes, the author is one of our own VMware employees, but see for yourself that Peter Bjork always speaks to the reality of the customer environment and the satisfaction of well-implemented technology. Leverage Peter’s dedication to the technology, wide spectrum of application experience, and commitment to help you extract the most value out of your investment in application virtualization.
Connecting OVS Bridges with Patch Ports
Spurred to action by a brief mention at the bottom of a blog post, I began digging into the use of patch ports to connect multiple Open vSwitch (OVS) bridges. In this post, I’ll show you how to connect two separate OVS bridges using a patch port, and then we’ll explore some possible use cases for this functionality.
Cloud Certification Overview
David Day, Director of Global Curriculum & Development, discusses the new cloud certification courses paths. He covers the professional, advanced, and expert role levels and the data center virtualization, cloud, end user computing, and cloud applications stacks. New in this strategy are opportunities to leverage skills/certification in one stack to move into another stack.
NFS Best Practices – Part 2: Advanced Settings
Following on from part 1 of the NFS Best Practices, part 2 is going to look at tuning from a vSphere perspective. As mentioned, our objective is to update the NFS Best Practice white paper which is now rather dated. There are quite a number of tunable parameters which are available to you when using NFS datastores. Before we drill into these advanced settings in a bit more detail, it is important to understand that the recommended values for some of these settings may (and probably will) vary from storage array vendor to storage array vendor. My objective is to give you a clear and concise explanation of the tunable parameters and allow you to make you own decisions when it comes to tuning the values.
Default VM Compatibility Level in VMware vSphere 5.1
VMware vSphere 5.1 has introduced Virtual Hardware version 9 (vmx-09). With the latest hardware version, VMs can have up to 64 vCPU, 1Bt of RAM or hardware accelerated 3D graphics (VMware View only). Together with VHV (virtualized hardware virtualization) improvements and less reboot requirements (from the vmx-09 and onwards), the overall management of versioning of virtual hardware and VMware tools installed per VM, has been changed too. The Default VM Compatibility Level decides what version of virtual hardware is presented as default for the VMs running on your host (cluster)/datacenter.
Serious performance impact on high IO VM with multiple snapshots
Recently I ran in to a situation where a customer suffered severe performance issues on a virtualized SQL server. In the SQL server we noticed a high CPU utilization, but the underlying ESX hosts only showed relatively low CPU utilization for this VM.
VCAP5-DCA Study Outline PDF
As with my previous post, the PDF below is a compilation of notes I took while studying for the VCAP5-DCA exam. It covers each section of the Blueprint provided by VMware.
In addition to my own studies, there are several great resources in the Community that I used & I reference those in the PDF. I recommend using them as well as implementing a Home Lab for testing.
VMware Tools Repair or Change
If you experience problems with mouse actions or enhanced graphics, there might be a VMware Tools issue in cause. There is simple fix by repairing VMware Tools installation. You can do aVMware Tools repair from the user interface of many VMware products, not only vSphere.
NFS Best Practices – Part 1: Networking
There is a project currently underway here at VMware to update the current Best Practices for running VMware vSphere on Network Attached Storage. The current paper is a number of years old now, and we are looking to bring it up to date. There are a number of different sections that need to be covered, but we decided to start with networking, as getting your networking infrastructure correct will play a crucial part in your NAS performance and availability obviously.
VCDX Bootcamps in New Zealand
Due to the overwhelming success of the VCDX Bootcamps I was involved with in Singapore and Sydney during vForum I have decided to run VCDX Bootcamps in New Zealand during January 2013 and have invited John Arrasjid (VCDX-001) along to join me. This is a unique learning opportunity, strictly limited places, to be offered free of charge. If you have any desire to progress to VCDX you can’t afford to miss these events. Read on to find out what you need to know.
Learning PowerCLI–What does it take ?
One of the most asked questions to me at VMworld this year was “what does it take to learn PowerCLI”, lots of people have seen the fantastic things you can do with PowerCLI, where it is drawing your infrastructure out into Visio or checking your VMware environment for potential issues.
Virtual Machine – all you need to know
I have been asked many times by non techie folks about what is virtual machine. I know that for the readers who follow my blog, the question might be inappropriate, but for those of you who does not know what is virtual machine and want to know simple answer, read on. Experienced virtualization users won’t find much new in this article.
VCAP5-DCD Study Outline PDF
In the PDF below is a compilation of notes I took while studying for the VCAP5-DCD exam. It covers each section of the Blueprint provided by VMware.
What is that poweron file in my .vSphere-HA folder?
When answering some questions in the vSphere HA section of the VMTN forum the “poweron” file was mentioned. I have gotten some other questions as well about this file so a public blog post makes most sense.
HOME : #VMUG
http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/vmug
The VMware User Group is an independent, global, customer-led organization, which maximizes members’ use of VMware and partner solutions through knowledge sharing, training, collaboration, and events.
HOME : #EDUCATION
Free Book Excerpt: Configuring vSphere Switches
Our friends at VMware Press have offered up another free chapter from Bill Ferguson’s Official VCP5 Certification Guide on configuring vSphere standard switches.
FREE eLearning VMware vSphere: What’s New v5.1 Available in 9 Languages
VMware releases FREE eLearning VMware vSphere: What’s New v5.1 in 9 languages
VCP-Cloud Certification Overview
Watch as David Day, VMware’s Director of Global Curriculum & Development, explains our new certification structure, how you can leverage your skills/certification in one solution to move into another, and the new VCP-Cloud Certification program.
vFabric RabbitMQ Fundamentals Launched
RabbitMQ is an open source message broker software or a MOM. It is a leading implementation of AMQP with wide adoption from large communities that are spread across a wide number of languages and problem domains. vFabric RabbitMQ features include:
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Please consider checking - http://blogs.vmware.com/kbdigest/ regularly for new and updated KB Articles.
Bundled ProductsConsiderations when upgrading bundled products (2036848) Date Published: 11/24/2012
VMware Data RecoveryInstalling the VDR client plugin on a Windows 7 or Windows Vista system fails with the error: VMware vSphere Client is required for installation (2020382) Date Published: 11/22/2012
VMware ESXVirtual machine displays a blue screen after using VMware Converter (2015424) Date Published: 11/20/2012
A virtual machine deployed from template or cloned cannot fails to ping outside network with the error: Unable to contact IP driver (2016747) Date Published: 11/20/2012
ESX 4.1 host stops booting at: * vmnix … (2030715) Date Published: 11/22/2012
VMware ESXiESXi 5.0 host experiences the purple diagnostic screen error: netxen_nic_detach_all_ports (2000227) Date Published: 11/21/2012
Mouse does not behave correctly in a virtual machine that has been manually Sysprepped (2012606) Date Published: 11/20/2012
ESXi 5.0 becomes unresponsive at power initialization (2014161) Date Published: 11/21/2012
Duplicate MAC addresses appear in multiple ESXi 5.x hosts (2030783) Date Published: 11/19/2012
Accessing Direct Console User Interface (DCUI) from an SSH session (2039638) Date Published: 11/21/2012
Distributed virtual switch configuration does not exist in vCenter Server 4.x after an upgrade (2013132) Date Published: 11/20/2012
Cannot install VMware Tools on Ubuntu 11.10 (2015253) Date Published: 11/20/2012
VMware Converter not showing virtual machine port group for Linux conversions (2004080) Date Published: 11/20/2012
Removing an ESXi 5.0 host from vCenter Server inventory fails with the error: Invalid Fault (2020565) Date Published: 11/22/2012
Reservation conflicts on shared storage are reported when ESXi host displays purple diagnostic screen (2030787) Date Published: 11/23/2012
Log entries are truncated within the Direct Console User Interface (DCUI) (2039640) Date Published: 11/21/2012
Update Option Values tasks visible in Virtual Center after enabling Content Based Read Cache (CBRC) (2035729) Date Published: 11/21/2012
Virtual machine loses network connectivity after a migration from an ESXi 5.1 host to an ESXi 5.0 host (2038301) Date Published: 11/19/2012
Single Root I/O Virtualization (SR-IOV) device consumes more PCI bus numbers than required for enabled virtual functions (2039824) Date Published: 11/19/2012
VMware FusionImporting a virtual machine in VMware Fusion (2039312) Date Published: 11/19/2012
The Fusion virtual machine fails to boot after upgrading the operating system (2039303) Date Published: 11/19/2012
VMware Service ManagerPerformance issue in RP09 before every API transaction the query files are reloading in VMware Service Manager 9.x (2038476) Date Published: 11/23/2012
Timezones not in correct format for outgoing actions for vCO workflows in VMware Service Manager 9.x (2038477) Date Published: 11/20/2012
API look up queries use UPPER(name) instead of the UP_name columns on the larger tables in VMware Service Manager 9.x (2038478) Date Published: 11/23/2012
Service Manager calls created by the Proactive Analysis functionality are assigned to the incorrect group (2039630) Date Published: 11/19/2012
Session expiry date and time are calculated based on database timezone in Service Manager (2039684) Date Published: 11/19/2012
Escalation dates display incorrectly in the selectable columns for calls outstanding and call search windows (2039741) Date Published: 11/19/2012
Email subject field is report name, not scheduled report name, in VMware Service Manager 9.x (2039755) Date Published: 11/20/2012
Backing up and restoring reports in Report Designer in VMware Service Manager 9.x (2039862) Date Published: 11/20/2012
Emails are sent to escalation recipients even when the email flag in the recipient list of the person configuration is not set (2039955) Date Published: 11/23/2012
Request Gantt charts in Service Manager do not have a column for Sunday (2039957) Date Published: 11/23/2012
Database server for Service Manager displays CPU spikes when integration event management is enabled (2040042) Date Published: 11/23/2012
In VMware Service Manager, text entered in Actions & Solutions field disappears after Deferring, Saving, or Submitting (2039743) Date Published: 11/19/2012
Closing a Service Manager parent call fails to send emails to the customers of child calls (2039357) Date Published: 11/19/2012
When using the Update VM Network Connection Outbound task in Service Manager, the IP address is left blank (2035008) Date Published: 11/22/2012
Service_Management_Extension table inaccessible in Report Designer in VMware Service Manager 9.x (2036889) Date Published: 11/20/2012
Copying and pasting contents from another source to a Service Manager call changes the format of the call screen (2038545) Date Published: 11/20/2012
The Service Manager task reopened through recursion and then completed remains active and does not complete (2039571) Date Published: 11/19/2012
Unsubmitted Service Orders containing zero services cannot be deleted from the customer portal home page in VMware Service Manager 9.x (2039752) Date Published: 11/21/2012
A scroll icon appears next to the Order button of available services in the Service Catalog window of the Service Manager portal (2039942) Date Published: 11/22/2012
VMware vCenter Chargeback ManagervCenter Chargeback Manager data collector services stop immediately after starting (2032755) Date Published: 11/21/2012
Data collectors are not removed from the Chargeback Manager System Health page when they are uninstalled (2033010) Date Published: 11/21/2012
VMware vCenter Multi-Hypervisor ManagerInstalling vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager best practices (2036700) Date Published: 11/19/2012
Installing vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager fails with the error: Error 1721. There is a problem with this Windows Installer Package (2036705) Date Published: 11/19/2012
Installing vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager plug-in best practices (2039704) Date Published: 11/19/2012
Enabling HTTP or HTTPS connections between vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager and Hyper-V hosts (2036702) Date Published: 11/19/2012
vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager FAQ (2037570) Date Published: 11/19/2012
Collecting diagnostic information for VMware vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager (2036696) Date Published: 11/19/2012
VMware vCenter Operations Manager (Standalone)Firewall requirements for vCenter Operations Manager SMTP Alerts (2039445) Date Published: 11/20/2012
VMware vCenter Operations Manager (vApp)Performing a side-by-side upgrade of the vCenter Operations 5.0 Appliance (2031543) Date Published: 11/21/2012
Running JConsole through ssh tunnel to troubleshoot vCenter Operations Manager vApp behind firewall (2032539) Date Published: 11/23/2012
VMware vCenter Orchestrator ApplianceCreating and locating the js-io-rights.conf file on the vCenter Orchestrator Appliance (2039821) Date Published: 11/20/2012
VMware vCenter ServerExporting and importing for manual Single Sign On (SSO) replication in VMware vCenter Server 5.1.x (2038677) Date Published: 11/20/2012
Replacing vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager and vCenter Server certificates (2039444) Date Published: 11/19/2012
Enabling Lockdown mode in vCenter Server fails with the error: General system error occurred: Invalid response (2007633) Date Published: 11/20/2012
Virtual machines display a black screen if the vSphere Client is installed with older versions of VMware Player or VMware Workstation (2014243) Date Published: 11/20/2012
VMware VirtualCenter Management Webservices fail to start after upgrading to vCenter Server 5.0 Update 1 (2016257) Date Published: 11/20/2012
vSphere Client Overview Performance Charts fail with the error: Perf Charts service experienced an internal error (2030307) Date Published: 11/21/2012
Creating an alarm or email notification that triggers when Disk Latency or DAVG is high (2033003) Date Published: 11/21/2012
Support for third-party software development using VMware APIs (2037792) Date Published: 11/23/2012
Scripts called from DB_and_schema_creation_scripts_dbType.sql are missing in vSphere 5.1 (2039860) Date Published: 11/20/2012
vCenter Server 5.0 does not function correctly when installed with Oracle 11.2.0.3 Patch 10 or later (2039874) Date Published: 11/21/2012
Suppressing the ESXi Summary tab message: The Local Tech Support Mode for the host has been enabled (2013657) Date Published: 11/20/2012
Migrating an ESXi/ESX host from one vCenter Server to another without disconnecting may cause statistics collection to fail (2039817) Date Published: 11/19/2012
VMware vCenter Server AppliancevSphere Client fails when adding the ESX/ESXi host to vCenter Server Appliance (2034504) Date Published: 11/22/2012
VMware vCenter Server HeartbeatLogging into Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 fails with the error: The login is from an untrusted domain and cannot be used with Windows authentication (2031113) Date Published: 11/23/2012
VMware vCenter Site Recovery ManagerVMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.0 Replication status shows as not active after configuration has completed successfully (2000213) Date Published: 11/23/2012
VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 5.x is not supported with IBM Storwize V7000 (2076) 6.4 (2013231) Date Published: 11/22/2012
List when creating a protection group does not show virtual machines that are replicated using vSphere Replication or shows replicated virtual machines that have been deleted (2013437) Date Published: 11/22/2012
Protecting a virtual machine using SRM and vSphere Replication fails with the error: Virtual machine is in an invalid state (2030132) Date Published: 11/21/2012
vSphere Replication fails with the error: Unknown controller type (2030526) Date Published: 11/21/2012
VMware vCloud DirectorOrg vDC monitoring does not reflect real-time virtual machine usage statistics (2030003) Date Published: 11/21/2012
VMware vFabric AppInsightInstalling vFabric AppInsight in Large Scale Environments (2039352) Date Published: 11/19/2012
Addressing Incompatible StartScript Property Values when Installing vFabric AppInsight 5.0 on WebLogic servers (2039776) Date Published: 11/19/2012
VMware vFabric PostgresvFabric Postgres fails with the error: invalid page header in block (2039918) Date Published: 11/22/2012
VMware View ManagerView Administrator Console fails to launch after an Upgrade to View 5.1 and installation of New SSL Certificates (2038842) Date Published: 11/21/2012
Issue with Persona Management and Folder Re-direction (2013263) Date Published: 11/22/2012
User profile is inaccessible after it has been created on the Persona Management Repository (2013589) Date Published: 11/22/2012
Cannot manage View Pools after upgrading to vCenter Server 5.0 (2014256) Date Published: 11/20/2012
Exporting RSA key fails with the error: Key not valid for use in specified state. FAILED! (2014748) Date Published: 11/20/2012
Generating a CSR and importing a signed certificate for View 5.1 (2030289) Date Published: 11/21/2012
Creating a new desktop pool in View Manager fails with the error: Unknown View Composer Error (2039449) Date Published: 11/23/2012
Multiple desktops are assigned to a user in a View floating pool (2031658) Date Published: 11/20/2012
Upgrading the View Connection Server fails and the installation rolls back (2034720) Date Published: 11/21/2012
Deleting a View desktop from the View Administrator console fails with the error: Error: Failed to delete VM: null (2039855) Date Published: 11/21/2012
VMware Virtual Disk DevelopmentThird-party backup software using VDDK 5.1 may encounter backup/restore failures (2039931) Date Published: 11/20/2012
VMware vShield EndpointSymantec Endpoint Protection 12.1.2 – vShield-enabled Shared Insight Cache (2039762) Date Published: 11/20/2012
VMware vSphere Storage ApplianceInstalling vSphere Storage Appliance fails with the error: Failed to complete network configuration for specified host: ‘hostname’ (2037665) Date Published: 11/22/2012
VMware WorkstationPerforming a Windows repair on a Windows XP virtual machine in VMware Workstation (2030544) Date Published: 11/22/2012
Troubleshooting access to shared folders in VMware Workstation (2030545)
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