VMware TAM Weekly newsletter 4.40

From the editors Virtual Desk
Hi everyone, next week is my busiest week of the year. On Monday I will be hosting our Queensland TAM customes for our annual TAM Day. This is something I look forward to more than any other day when I get to thank our most valued customers who are part of the TAM program. This year we have an entire day af awesome food, the obligatory fresh brewed coffee and of course amazing sessions covering everything from our end user computing solutions through to the latest vCloud and security suites.

Straight after TAM Day I will be off to vForum in Sydney, this is another event that I wait the entire year for and really enjoy. It is the one time of the year I am able to discuss VMware with many different types of organisations both large and small and find the conversations that I have during this event with our passionate customers to be stimulating.

Whether you are a TAM Customer in Brisbane, coming to TAM Day or a VMware customer going to vForum I wish you a successful and fun week and encourage you to take the opportunity to meet the VMware team at each of these events.

**New!! Subscribing to Patch/Maintenance Alerts** To receive an email alert as soon as a patch or maintenance release becomes available, please subscribe via the following link on the Support home page: http://support.vmware.com/selfsupport/subscription

Please note that there will be no newsletter next week but I promise a bumper wrap up the following week after vForum.

Best Wishes
Neil Isserow (Newsletter Editor)
Queensland Technical Account Manager
Newsletter Archive: communities.vmware.com/blogs/vmwaretam

HOME : #HOT-NEWS
-       TAM DAY BRISBANE 2012 is on Monday
-       vForum Sydney is on Wednesday and Thursday
-       vForum TAM Lunch is on Thursday

HOME : #PARTNER
VPN Launches VMware Partner News Blog
We are excited to announce the new VMware Partner News Blog, a daily digest of the news you need from the VMware Partner Network that is searchable by function, region, product, partner type and more. This new blog will also be a great tool for you to use as a reference as it shows all of the top news and updates in a consistent and archived format.
Each article will be tagged by the following categories so you can find the content that uniquely fits your needs:

VMware Zimbra 8.0: Messaging & Collaboration for the Post-PC Era
Have you had a chance to explore the new release of VMware Zimbra 8.0? With more than 85 million paid mailboxes worldwide, Zimbra offers the most innovative messaging and collaboration experience available today. Built on the strength of VMware’s cloud expertise, Zimbra offers organizations of all sizes the option to deploy a browser-based email solution in a private or public cloud.

HOME : #FEATURED-ARTICLE
Join Thousands of IT Professionals at vForum 2012
The most important annual event in the virtualization, cloud and end-user computing calendar is here. vForum 2012 is your chance to get up-to-date on all that’s happening with the latest technology and its applications to transform IT and your business.
VMware executives and industry leaders discuss the latest technology and trends
Learn in more than 75 Sessions and build your technical skills through the Hands-on Labs
Engage with the many IT organisations showcasing the latest virtualization, cloud and end-user computing solutions

When:
Wednesday and Thursday
14 & 15 November 2012
Where:
Sydney Convention & Exhibition Centre,
Exhibition Hall 5.

http://tinyurl.com/8dbwkuj

Sessions List - http://tinyurl.com/8mdsqyj

HOME : #SECURITY-ADVISORIES
Prelim:
VMware Security Advisory Advisory ID: VMSA-2012-0015 Synopsis:    VMware Hosted Products and OVF Tool address security issues Issue date: 2012-11-08 Updated on: 2012-11-08 (initial advisory) CVE number: CVE-2012-5458, CVE-2012-5459 and CVE-2012-3569

October 4, 2012 VMSA-2012-0014
VMSA-2012-0014
VMware vCenter Operations, CapacityIQ, and Movie Decoder security updates
[more]

HOME : #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 07, 2012
Socialcast® By VMware Named A Leader In IDC MarketScape: Worldwide Enterprise Social Software
· October 31, 2012
Study Shows IT and Business Professionals are Finding Business Advantages in Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service
· October 31, 2012
Study Shows IT and Business Professionals are Finding Business Advantages in Cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service

HOME : #TWEETS
(@VMWARETAM)
VMware TAM Program‏@VMwareTAM
Monday is TAM Day in Brisbane, looking forward to seeing my TAM customers there

VMware TAM Program‏@VMwareTAM
vForum in Sydney is just days away, are your registered, it's going to be awesome

HOME : #TRAINING-SCHEDULE

Course	Date	Register
VMware View: Design Best Practices [V5.1]	12 Dec - 14 Dec	http://mylearn.vmware.com/register.cfm?ui=www_edu&course=154748
VMware View: Install, Configure, Manage [V5.1]	17 Dec - 20 Dec	http://mylearn.vmware.com/register.cfm?ui=www_edu&course=140703
VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage [V5.0]	17 Dec - 21 Dec	http://mylearn.vmware.com/register.cfm?ui=www_edu&course=131647

HOME

: #WEBCASTS

Big, Fast, Flexible Data with Cloud Delivery

November 13th 2012 9:00 AM Pacific Standard Time (GMT -08:00, San Francisco)

VMware vSphere 5.1 QuickStart Series Part 2: vCenter Server 5.1 What's New

November 14th 2012 9:00 AM Pacific Standard Time (GMT -08:00, San Francisco)

Getting Started with Virtualization on the VMware Platform–Fast, Easy and Efficient

November 15th 2012 9:00 AM Pacific Standard Time (GMT -08:00, San Francisco)

VMworld 2012 End-User Computing Announcement Technical Reviews

November 28th 2012 9:00 AM Pacific Standard Time (GMT -08:00, San Francisco)

Building a Compliant, Trusted Cloud in Healthcare

November 29th 2012 9:00 AM Pacific Standard Time (GMT -08:00, San Francisco)

HOME

: #TAM

TAM Day 2012 Brisbane

Are you a TAM Customer in Brisbane, watch out for your invite to TAM Day 2012, coming soon!

vForum Sydney 2012 – TAM Day Lunch – Agenda (Register via your TAM)

12:30pm:	Registration (foyer, Level 2) Welcome and introduction by Mike Walshe, TAM Program Manager, VMware APJ
12:45pm:	Steve Herrod, CTO and Sr VP of R&D, VMware Inc.
1:20pm:	Neal Mueller, Product Marketing Manager, VMware Inc.
1:45pm:	Q&A
1:55pm:	Close

HOME : #

VMwareTV: VMware SMB Podcast Interview with John White -- Disaster Recovery

VMwareTV: Whats New in PowerCLI 5.1 - Datastore Clusters

VMwareTV: Oracle Virtualization: Benefits and Perceived Barriers

VMwareTV: Advantages of Virtualizing Business Critical Enterprise Applications

VMwareTV: Advantages and Overcoming Perceived Barriers of Virtualizing SAP

VMwareTV: How to Virtualize SAP on VMware

VMwareTV: Gartner Research Recommends Virtualizing Microsoft Exchange

VMwareTV: Virtualize Business Critical Oracle Apps on VMware

VMwareTV: VMware vFabric Application Director drag and drop interface

VMwareTV: VMware at Cornerstone Community Bank

VMwareTV: CARCO Group, Inc. and VMware

VMwareTV: BFL CANADA Transforms Business through VMware Virtualization

HOME

: #VFABRIC

vFabric Data Director supports Oracle, SQL Server, Hadoop, Postgres – Accelerates database virtualization and Big Data adoption

Virtualization continues to be one of the top priorities for CIOs. As the share of virtualized workloads approaches 60%, the enterprise is looking at database and big data workloads as the next target. Their goal is to realize the virtualization benefits with the plethora of relational database sprawling in their data centers. With the increasing popularity of analytic workloads on Hadoop, virtualization presents a fast and efficient way to get started with existing infrastructure, and scale the data dynamically as needed.

Application Director Beta Open To Public

Due to popular request by customers and the field since the

VMworld announcement making vFabric Application Director to be part of the vCloud Suite, VMware is opening the beta program for the next release of

vFabric Application Director to the public. Both current or potential customers are invited to try beta the latest version of VMwares innovative application provisioning software that was showcased at VMworld and saved VMware own internal IT organization up to

90% in time to provision and 30% of the cost.

Webcast: Big, Fast, Flexible Data with Cloud Delivery

As we’ve

previously covered, data growth is quite unbelievable, and this means traditional database models are being stretched. On

Tuesday, November 13, 2012 at 9:00 AM PST, VMware’s Joe Russell will be presenting on several topics related to

Big, Fast, Flexible Data and how VMWare’s key data management technologies help companies overcome some of the key challenges with traditional RDBMS.

Buying vSphere or vCloud? Get a Free vFabric Suite Advanced License

As most followers of this blog know,

vFabric Suite is a lightweight, scalable, integrated middleware suite for on-site or cloud-based data-intensive custom applications. It is the best Cloud Application Platform for running Spring/Java on virtualized infrastructure. This free license is worth checking out for a myriad of reasons – for example, you can:

Spring Framework 3.2 RC1 released

Dear Spring community, I'm pleased to announce that the first Spring Framework 3.2 release candidate is now available. This generation of the core framework is a straightforward next step after last year's Spring Framework 3.1, continuing several well-established themes. Key features in Spring Framework 3.2 include: * A new Gradle-based framework build, making it easier

Read more...

A Groovy DSL For Spring Integration

Spring Integration implements Enterprise Integration Patterrns using the Spring programming model to enable messaging in Spring-based applications. Spring Integration also provides integration with external systems using declarative adapters supporting jms, http, amqp, tcp, ftp(s), smtp, and so on. Currently, configuring message flows is primarily done via Spring XML and Spring Integration supports several namespaces to

As Juergen Hoeller mentioned in his post announcing the release of Spring Framework 3.2 RC1, the Spring Team has introduced some exciting new features in terms of testing support. Most importantly, we've added first-class support for testing web applications. [1] Please note: this is a cross post from my Swiftmind company blog. In this post

Read more...

HOME

: #VCLOUD

New Study Shows Growth of Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) Adoption

While security is still cited as a concern when it comes to public cloud adoption,

a recent study of 243 IT and business professionals, conducted by analyst firm Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), suggests that many companies are beginning to feel more comfortable with the public cloud, as they move beyond the test and development phase of their public cloud deployments.

Does Hybrid Cloud Work? Learn From Five Successful Enterprise Companies in This Free Webinar

Hybrid cloud strategy can feel like a lot to take on in addition to managing your company’s private cloud, handling ongoing requests and trying to keep the business happy by keeping costs down but providing more in return.

vCloud Director *(Any) Storage Profile

I recently posted an article about

Architecting Storage Offering for vCloud Director 5.1. In the article I discussed new architecture considerations for the latest version of vCloud Director.

HOME

: #SECURITY

VMware Security Note

Today, Nov. 4, 2012, our security team became aware of the public posting of VMware ESX source code dating back to 2004. This source code is related to the source code posted publicly on April 23, 2012. (For reference:

April 24, 2012 and

May 3, 2012). It is possible that more related files will be posted in the future. We take customer security seriously and have engaged our VMware Security Response Center to thoroughly investigate.

HOME

: #EUC

HOME

: #VSPHERE

Which vSphere client should I use and when?

With the release of vSphere 5.1 comes a new primary administration tool for managing your VMware vSphere 5.x environments, the vSphere Web Client. While the new web client has been given feature parity with that of previous vSphere Desktop Clients; the new features released with vSphere 5.1 are only managed via the vSphere Web Client. To help understand the functionality of each client, below lists the new features that are only available via the web client and several features that remain available only in the desktop client. If a feature is not listed then that functionality is available in both the vSphere Web Client and the vSphere Desktop Client.

NAT deployment using vCloud Networking and Security 5.1 Edge

VMware vCloud Networking and Security virtualizes networks and security to create efficient, agile, and extensible logical constructs that meet the performance and scale requirements of virtualized datacenters. vCloud Networking and Security Edge is part of the vCloud Networking and Security solution and provides network edge security and gateway services. Edge connects isolated (stub) networks to shared (uplink or external) networks by providing common gateway services such as DHCP, VPN, NAT, and Load Balancing. Also an Edge can be used to interconnect internal networks for isolation and routing with no uplink and or external access. Common deployments of Edge include the DMZ, VPN Extranets, and multi-tenant Cloud environments where the Edge provides perimeter security and L4 to L7 services for Virtual Datacenters (VDCs).

VMware Remote Console (VMRC) 5.1 SDK Download Now Available!

The latest release of VMRC 5.1 SDK now provides support for both vSphere 5.1 as well as vCloud Director 5.1:

The VMRC SDK allows you to use a Web-based application to connect to a vCenter- or vCloud Director-managed virtual machine and access that virtual machine’s console in a browser window. You can interact with the virtual machine console input and screen. You can also use the VMRC SDK to manage virtual and physical device connections on a vCenter-managed virtual machine.

vSphere Inventory Searching and Tagging

With the release of vSphere 5.1, many new features were added and I really like some of the new search capabilities which can be great timesavers when administering a vSphere environment.

vCloud Suite – VSA 5.1 Cluster Service Considerations & Successful Deployments Series – Part 1

The new vSphere Storage Appliance 5.1 (VSA) introduced a great deal of new enhancements and capabilities to address the needs and use cases of small business (SMB) and adjacent markets such as remote office/branch office (ROBO). One particular enhancement I will cover as the first part of this blog series is the new VSA Cluster Service and its consideration for successful deployments.

HOME

: #LABS

labs.vmware.com

I/O Analyzer

VMware I/O Analyzer is a virtual appliance solution, which provides a simple and standardized way of measuring storage performance in VMware vSphere virtualized environments. I/O Analyzer supports two types of workload generator: IOmeter for synthetic workload and trace replay for real-world application workload. It collects both guest level statistics as well as the host level statistics via VMware VI SDK. Standardizing load generation and stats collection increases the confidence of the customer and VMware engineers in the data collected. It also ensures completeness of data collected.

HOME

: #OFFICIAL-BLOGS

VMware for Small-Medium Business Blog: New Live, Online Training Helps SMBs Running VMware Overcome Limited Time and Budget for Training

If you are an IT admin for a growing organization, sometimes getting the budget and time away from the office to attend training can be a challenge. VMware Education, Americas, has the answer with our latest course and new delivery method. Just released, the new

VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage for SMBs course, delivered via

Epic Live, focuses strictly on the features and technologies in VMware vSphere that enable small and midsize organizations to transform their IT operations to be more agile and responsive. In addition, this new course is delivered in a manner that allows professionals to work, train, gain hands-on experience and revisit content without leaving the comfort of their office.

Workstation Zealot: VMware Workstation Updates Now Available

VMware Workstation 9.0.1 is now available

VMware Workstation 9.0.1 is a maintenance release that is a free update for all VMware Workstation 9.x customers.

Read the release notes for more details.

VMware Workstation 8.0.5 is now available

VMware Workstation 8.0.5 is a maintenance release that is a free update for all VMware Workstation 8.x customers.

Read the release notes for more details.

vSphere PowerCLI Blog: What’s new in PowerCLI 5.1–Datastore Clusters

As with previous releases of PowerCLI we constantly improve the number of cmdlets and enable the ability to work with some of the latest features. With the recent release of PowerCLI 5.1 we have introduced the ability to work with Datastore Clusters. This can be useful for the following scenarios:

HOME

: #EXTERNAL-BLOGS

VMware View Licensing for Dummies

Questions about VMware View licensing often appear in my radar, especially from customers under ELA. Customers under VMware ELA may deploy as many VMware products as they wish based on agreement and need to report usage back to VMware.

VAAI Comparison – Block versus NAS

I get a lot of questions around how the vSphere APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) primitives compare from a protocol perspective. For instance, a common question is to describe the differences between the primitives for NAS storage arrays (NFS protocol) and the primitives for block storage arrays (Fibre Channel, iSCSI, Fibre Channel over Ethernet protocols). It is a valid question because, yes, there are significant differences and the purpose of this blog post is to detail them for you.

vSphere HA compatibility list, how do I check it?

Someone

reported issues that in their environment VMs could not be restarted as there were no compatible hosts available. The relevant part of the error message was:

N3Vim5Fault16NoCompatibleHostE

I don’t know why in this case it happened as the log files unfortunately don’t provide these details. This person had manually restarted all of his VMs and that actually worked okay. This could mean that some how the “compatibility list” that vSphere HA maintains was not complete or it wasincorrect. So the question would be how do you validate that if you ever end up in a scenario like this?

How to change vCenter URL in VMware View

In some cases VMware View may show a problem with the certificate on the vCenter Server, displaying a dashboard red flag even when certificates and properly in place. This behavior can happen because the administrator entered the vCenter Server address in VMware View Admin UI using the short name instead of the FQDN, but the certificate used on the vCenter Server is a wildcard certificate for the domain.

Resizing an IDE virtual disk, part two

A long time ago I wrote this article about

resizing an IDE virtual disk. I just ran out of diskspace on my Windows 7 VM and I needed to increase the disk. Unfortunately the Windows 7 VM had and IDE disk and the Web Client didn’t allow me to simply increase the size of the VMDK. So this is what I had to do, and yes I agree it should be easier than this.

VMware Horizon Mobile 1.2 - Available for download

VMware Horizon Mobile enables enterprises to securely provision and manage corporate mobile workspaces on Android smartphones in isolation from employees' personal environments. This dual-persona solution makes corporate data more secure and enables enterprises to take advantage of employee-owned mobile devices.

How do I configure an HA vpxd.das advanced setting?

On the community forums

someone asked a question around how to set “config.vpxd.das.electionWaitTimeSec”. I was looking at the

documentation and it is indeed not really clear on what / where / how to set an HA vpxd.das advanced setting. This

KB article kind explains it, but let me summarize it and simplify it.

PowerCLI 5.1 – new datastore clusters commandlets – see the video

In this new video done by Alan Renouf (Virtu-al.net) he shows you some new commandlets which are now present in the vSphere

PowerCLI 5.1. There are quite a few possibilities on what to do with those PowerCli commandlets. This is a step-by-step video….

VMFS File Locking in VMware View 5.1 [WhitePaper]

VMware Technical Staff Jubish Jose has produced a detailed technical white paper that provides a thorough understanding of how VMFS File Locking mechanism impacts VMware View when used with View Composer to create Linked Clones.

vCenter Operations Manager – Caught out by new Solution Licensing step

In a few recent posts, I’ve been looking at performance counters in vSphere 5.1. One of my colleagues,

Hugo Strydom, reached out to me about doing a vCenter Operations (vCOps) custom dashboard to monitor the new Storage I/O Control (SIOC) counters in vSphere 5.1 which I detailed

here. Hugo has done a whole series of great blog posts on vCOps on his

blog site. I thought it would really cool to get this setup on my environment and take a look.

Are ESXi 5.x patches cumulative?

I find this question being asked again and again in the VMware forums by people who cannot just use Update Manager for patching, and most times the answers that are given there are a bit vague and unclear or even plain wrong. This is because ESXi patching is a really complex and not well documented matter. So I need to provide some background information before I'm going to answer this question:

VMFS File Sharing Limits increased to 32

I was reading this white paper about

VMware View 5.1 and VMFS File Locking today. It mentions the 8 host cluster limitation for VMware View with regards to linked clones and points to VMFS file sharing limits as the cause for this. While this is true in a way, VMware View 5.1 is limited to 8 host clusters for linked clones on VMFS Datastores, the explanation doesn’t cover all details or reflect the current state of vSphere / VMFS. (Although there is a fair bit of details in there about VMFS prior to vSphere 5.1.)

Technical White Paper - VMFS File Locking and Its Impact in VMware View 5.1

View versions prior to 5.1 had a limitation of supporting a maximum of eight hosts in an ESX cluster when VMware vStorage Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) storage was used. This was a barrier in a large-scale deployment of virtual desktops. View 5.1 breaks this scalability limitation by supporting a maximum of 32 hosts in an ESX cluster provided NFS storage is used for linked clone replica creation. Some common questions from

customers include:

vCloud Director Snapshots video

vCloud Director 5.1 which has been released recently now allows to create snapshots. I have detailed the features of vCD in my post here –

vCloud Director 5.1 released – what’s new? . By default the snapshot colon isn’t checked, so you’re not able to see if the vApp or VM has an active snapshot or not.

IP Masquerade on Edge Gateways in VMware vCloud Director 5.1

Last week I was helping a customer with installing and configuring VMware vCloud Director 5.1. Things were going pretty smooth until I noticed that we could not get any traffic to get out of the organisation to the external network. The Organisation network was connected to a Edge Gateway but it did not let any traffic through. In vCloud 1.5 this just worked out of the box. It used to have IP Masquerade and NAT enabled per default. After some troubleshooting we figured this was not the case in vCloud 5.1 on Edge Gateways. To enable IP Masquerade and NAT you have to do the following.

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

Registration Open for Feb 2013 VCDX Defenses

The VMware Certification team is pleased to announce that

registration is now open for the next VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) defenses during VMware Partner Exchange (PEX), February 23-28, 2013 in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Both

VCDX4 and

VCDX5 defenses will be held during this session. The deadline for applying is January 4, 2013.

If you have any questions about the PEX Las Vegas defense, please post to this

thread on the VCDX forum so that other candidates may benefit from the answers.

FREE VMware vCloud Director Training

vCloud Director

is one of our top trending instructor led courses

each week. Well, now you can access short instructional videos based on the same key training material. From concepts & architecture to building a vApp to creating site-to-site VPNs, there’s a lot of FREE training available on the VMware video site

. Begin your learning journey today!

Free Book Excerpt: Administering VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.0

Our friends at VMware Press have provided our readers a

free chapter excerpt from their new release, Administering VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.0 by Mike Laverick.

HOME

: #SUPPORT

- VMWARE SUPPORT INSIDER

How to- VLAN configuration on virtual switches, physical switches, and virtual machines

There are three methods of VLAN tagging that can be configured on ESXi/ESX. Our presentation today provides a brief overview of these methods that can be configured on ESX/ESXi: External Switch Tagging (EST), Virtual Switch Tagging (VST), and Virtual Guest Tagging (VGT).

New vSphere Web Client Programming video series coming soon!

We have been a little bit quiet as of late, but we are hard at work preparing some new video material for your self-learning, knowledge-advancement and problem-solving needs.

The next three videos that you will see being uploaded from us over the next day or so are part of a new 3-part video series entitled “

Getting Started with vSphere Web Client Programming” which will provide some insights as well as some deep-dive training and step-by-step demonstrations and examples of how you can setup a platform for developing your own solutions for the vSphere Web Client.

HOME

: #KB-ARTICLES

Please consider checking -

http://blogs.vmware.com/kbdigest/ regularly for new and updated KB Articles.

Socialcast On Premise

Cannot log in using Company Login in Socialcast On Premise (2036698) Date Published: 10/31/2012

VMware ESX

The ESX/ESXi 4.1 Update 2 host console screen reports the error: 0.00.00.03.004 cpu0:4096)PCI: 2804: failed for 000:128.02.0 0 (2038320) Date Published: 10/29/2012

vNIC connected to a vDS appears to disconnect and reconnect during snapshot operations (2011040) Date Published: 10/29/2012

VMware ESXi

ESXi 4.1 host fails with a Page Fault Exception and COW operations in the backtrace (2017599) Date Published: 10/30/2012

Upgrading from a Dell customized VMware ESXi 5.0 ISO to a later version fails at 26% (2036167) Date Published: 10/30/2012