From the editors Virtual Desk
Hi everyone and a huge welcome to 2013. I am so excited about all of the new technology that we can look forward to this year. Currently the CES has been on in Las Vegas and if you have been following it does seem like there are many technology items being released that are geard toward the mobile lifestyle. I think that as a theme this will prevail for 2013 and I am certain that VMware will bringthe best of this to you.
Of course I plan on bringing you a newsletter every week (or as many as possible) for 2013. Last year we had 42 newsletter and have now delivered more than 160 over the past 4 years. The newsletter has evolved from 4 years ago but it is always driven by you the reader so of course if you have anything you would like to include or change please just email me and let me know.
All of the news in this weeks newsletter is from the 25th of December onwards however the KB articles are only the latest so please ensure that you have checked if any of the previous KB articles pertain to your environment.
I hope you had a great festive season break and managed to spend the time doing whatever it is you love to do. I hope that 2013 will be as exciting as last year and expect it will be even more so.
Thank you for reading and please enjoy the first newsletter of 2013.
Best Wishes
Neil Isserow (Newsletter Editor)
Queensland Technical Account Manager
Newsletter Archive: communities.vmware.com/blogs/vmwaretam
HOME : #HOT-NEWS
- First newsletter of 2013
- New KB articles (please check previous)
HOME : #PARTNER
Share Partner Feedback for a Chance at a Free Pass to Partner Exchange
VMware is conducting a global research effort regarding our brand strategy and would like to get your perspective. We are looking for feedback from our partners located in the United States of America, United Kingdom, Germany, Australia and Japan. If you complete a 30 minute phone interview with our research partner, Illuminas, you will be entered into a drawing to win a free pass to VMware Partner Exchange, which takes place February 25-28, 2013 in Las Vegas.
Make a Resolution to Take Advantage of vmLIVE
Do you know what vmLIVE is? Are you aware of the value vmLIVE can bring to your VMware business? Has this enablement tool been one of those things on your list that you’ve been meaning to look into, but haven’t had the chance? Whatever your reason may be… now is the time to make your vmLIVE resolution.
HOME : #FEATURED-ARTICLE
Office of the CTO Blogs: Network Virtualization in the Software-Defined Data Center
This post co-authored by Bruce Davie, Martin Casado, and Brad Hedlund
VMware has long been known as the company that changed computing by virtualizing servers. At Nicira, we set out to disrupt networking just as VMware disrupted computing, by virtualizing networks. The analogy between network virtualization and server virtualization can be a helpful one, but it is still only an analogy, and analogies can only take you so far. The point of this post is to dig a bit deeper into network virtualization – what it is, what it means for the industry, and how VMware, in the aftermath of the Nicira acquisition, plans to change networking.
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.
: #PRESS-RELEASES
· December 17, 2012
VMware Network Virtualization Paves the Way for Next Generation Cloud Services at iland
December 03, 2012
HOME :
#TWEETS
(@VMWARETAM)
VMware vSphere Blog: Configuring vCloud Director 5.1 with the vCNS Load Balancer
Make a resolution to take advantage of vmLIVE in 2013. Learn more about our global interactive webcast tool for the VPN
VMware Edu Services@VMwareEducation
if you attended a qualifying course a Lab Connect voucher will be emailed to you shortly after completion http://ow.ly/gKknn
Installing and Configuring
#VMware Horizon Application Manager Part 1: First of all, download the Application Ma...
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HOME :
#WEBCASTS
Service Provisioning with VMware vFabric Application Director 5.0
January 16th 2013 9:00 AM Pacific Standard Time (GMT -08:00, San Francisco)
Descripción general de VMware vCloud Suite
January 16th 2013 9:00 AM Pacific Standard Time (GMT -08:00, San Francisco)
Gain Control and Visibility into Your IT Environment
January 17th 2013 9:00 AM Pacific Standard Time (GMT -08:00, San Francisco)
Uma visão geral do VMware vCloud Suite
January 17th 2013 10:00 AM Pacific Standard Time (GMT -08:00, San Francisco)
VMware vCloud Suite Overview with Disaster Recovery Demonstration
January 23rd 2013 9:00 AM Pacific Standard Time (GMT -08:00, San Francisco)
: #TAM
: #TV
VMwareTV: VMware View Customer - City of Pittsburgh Information Systems
VMwareTV: VMware Service Provider Program (VSPP) for Infrastructure-as-a-Service Business
VMware vFabric Blog: Part 2: The Value, Architecture, & Code for Building Geography-Based Apps
HOME :
#VFABRIC
Building a Multi-Tenant Development Mindset in the Travel Software Industry
Part 2: The Value, Architecture, & Code for Building Geography-Based Apps
4 Reasons You Should Consider Modernizing Mainframe Apps in 2013
VMware vFabric tc Server to Continue Support of Java 6
Messaging Architecture: Using RabbitMQ at the World’s 8th Largest Retailer
Scaling and Modernizing .NET and Java: SQLFire Performance Test Blows Away Traditional RDBMS
3 Game Changing Capabilities in SQLFire
: #VCLOUD
Cloudy With a Chance of Service Outage: 5 Big Questions to Ask Your Cloud Provider
Gartner
predicts worldwide IT spending in 2013 will top $3.7 trillion. Coupled with IDC’s
prediction that there will be over $25 billion in acquisitions as cloud services become the centerpiece of more and more vendor’s offerings, you can see that enterprise IT customers will have many more choices in front of them when it comes to acquiring technology and services in 2013.
: #SECURITY
A New Year and New VMware vShield Protection: Symantec Endpoint Protection
One year ago, there was really only a single option available if a VMware customer wished to use the
vShield Endpoint introspection possible on vSphere to protect servers or virtual desktops. As 2013 begins, the number of partner solutions has grown to a half-dozen and continues to grow. It’s probably an understatement to call the latest of these, “much anticipated”. The introduction I’m referring to is Symantec’s
Endpoint Protection 12.1.2. With the mid-December availability of Symantec’s entry to the field of virtual guest protection, we welcome a new year.
: #EUC
The Cost Benefits of Desktop Virtualization
Although many IT professionals understand the value of exploring desktop virtualization, the cost and business benefits are not always articulated outside of IT. In a recent
Google+ Hangout, vExpert David Davis of TrainSignal discussed how he successfully made the case for desktop virtualization by showing how it would both help the organization achieve cost savings, as well as open the door to unrealized benefits and efficiencies. David provides tactical advice on presenting a compelling business case for VDI in an organization that includes gaining centralized control of application deployment and increased security. Learn more about David’s experience in the video below, and download the
Desktop Virtualization Business Case Information Guide to help make your organization’s case.
VMware Dominates Reader’s Choice Award
At VMware we take tremendous pride in our products and like any software company, we covet positive reviews from press and analysts. However, the real proof that we are building quality products that solve real customer problems is through happy customers. That is why we are extremely proud of the recent spade of reader’s choice award wins customers have selected VMware end-user computing products for in the December 2012/January 2013
issue of Virtualization Review.
: #VSPHERE
Capturing Virtual Machine Screenshots in vSphere
Over the holiday break I was cleaning out some of my old notes and I came across the subject of capturing virtual machine screenshots in vSphere. This topic comes up from time to time when talking to customers and the methods to accomplish this task may not always be clear. Capturing screenshots of a virtual machine is a capability provided by the vSphere platform and it is actually leveraged by several VMware features and products such as:
What is the difference between PCPU Used and PCPU Utilized?
I’m often asked the question when looking at vSphere statistics – “What is the difference between PCPU Used and PCPU Utilized and why don’t they match?” Let’s take a look as it can be somewhat complex.
First lets start with some definitions:
VMware Profile Based Management Survey
olks, please take a few short minutes of you time and fill out this very important survey. The VMware Storage Product Management team is looking to gather information and data points on the use of currently available VMware storage technologies and they would like to hear directly from customers. The focus of the survey is to identify the number of customers which are actually utilizing the VMware Storage technologies such as vSphere APIs Storage Awareness (VASA), vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI)
, Storage Profiles, etc.
Network Troubleshooting Using ESXCLI 5.1
When it comes to network troubleshooting in an ESXi host, there are various types of information that can be useful to a vSphere administrator such as basic information like a virtual machine’s IP Addresses, MAC Addresses, Uplink ports, Port ID, etc. to the network statistics view in the [r]esxtop command-line utility. However, all of this useful information today is spread across multiple tools and this can be challenging for a vSphere administrator when needing to quickly retrieve this data while troubleshooting an issue.
Exiting Lockdown Mode Can Disable “root” Access (if you remove “root” from the DCUI.Access)
I recently came across a situation where I was unable to login to my ESXi host as root. This caught me off guard as I hadn’t intentionally disabled root, but suddenly, and seemingly out of the blue, root logins stopped working.
It seems the debate between using a VMDK on VMFS or an RDM still rages when it comes to the question which one is better for performance.
The VMware team has published a lot of evidence in the past that the difference is very minor, in fact difficult to measure accurately and probably unperceivable to customers. Definitely not worth giving up the value of encapsulating a VM.
Automate Backups of VDS & Distributed Portgroup Configurations in vSphere 5.1
One of the coolest new networking feature found in vSphere 5.1 in my opinion is the ability to backup and restore a vSphere Distributed Virtual Switch (VDS) and/or vSphere Distributed Portgroup configurations. As you can imagine, there are a variety of use cases for leveraging such a feature like periodic backups in case of user error, change management, rollback and recovery, configuration audit/management and the list goes on and on.
Configuring vCloud Director 5.1 with the vCNS Load Balancer
Many networking enhancements have been made available with the release of vCloud Director 5.1 using vCNS 5.1 (vCloud Networking and Security) and vSphere 5.1. There have been inquiries and activity around some of the new features and how to configure them; load balancing being one of them. If you have more than one VM as part of a pool and want incoming traffic to be balanced between them, this is a key feature included with your product.
: #LABS
labs.vmware.com
Featured Fling: View Controlled Recompose Script
View Controlled Recompose Script
This script performs a Controlled Recompose of a VMware View Linked Clone Pool of Virtual Desktops. It first identifies a free desktop and recomposes it to create the first Replica Desktop.
HOME : #BUSINESS CRITICAL APPLICATION (BCA)
Organizational Best Practices for Virtualizing Business Critical Applications
When embarking on your virtualization journey, keep these key organizational best practices in mind.
50 Partners To Help You Virtualize Business Critical Applications
VMware Partners have the option to complete extra coursework to become VBCA Competent. There are many partners with this designation globally to help you virtualize your business-critical applications. The following is a partial list of the VBCA Competent partners. Please go to
http://partnerlocator.vmware.com for a complete list of partners in your area.
Formula to Determine Availability of SAP running on an ESXi Cluster
When we architect SAP on VMware deployments an important topic is how we design for high availability. We have options in the VMware environment from VMware HA, VMware FT and use of in-guest clustering software like Microsoft Cluster Services or Linux-HA. So can we determine a numerical availability for our design expressed as a fraction/percentage (same metric used to define uptime Service Level Agreements like 99.9% )? Yes, there are ways to estimate this value and one method is explained in the following paper
http://www.availabilitydigest.com/public_articles/0712/sap_vmware.pdf . This paper develops an equation to estimate the availability of SAP running on an ESXi cluster expressed as a fraction/percentage. The concepts are taken from other papers at
http://www.availabilitydigest.com (a digest of topics on high availability) and are based on mathematical algebra and probability theory that have been previously used in the IT industry for availability calculations. The availability metric (e.g. 99.9% or 0.999) is essentially a probability hence we use mathematical probability techniques to calculate the overall availability of a system.
Windows Server 2012 VM-Generation ID Support in vSphere
Active Directory Domain Services has been one of those applications that, to the naked eye, seemed like it was a no brainer to virtualize. Why not? In most environments it’s a fairly low utilization workload, rarely capable of efficiently using the resources found in many of the enterprise-class servers that have been available for the past few years. Many organizations have adopted this way of thinking and have successfully virtualized all of their domain controllers. What about the hold-outs? What is it about Active Directory that has left so many AD administrators and architects keeping their infrastructure, or at least a portion of it on physical servers?
HOME :
#OFFICIAL-BLOGS
VMware Virtualization Management Blog: 3 Videos on How Apps Will Be Deployed In the Future
We’ve come a long way since programming via punched cards
. Now, we have observatories in our pocket
because many tools to help us simplify software.
A recent article spoke of how installation and provisioning
is getting simpler. This is part of a wave of technology innovation that is aimed at every part of the application lifecycle. The main goal is to figure out a way to take weeks of work and make it happen at the push of a button, streamlining development, making routine tasks repeatable and eliminating errors.
VMware Accelerate: No More Excuses for Delaying Innovation
As I was starting to write this blog, I realized that we’ve safely passed December 21, 2012, better known as the completion of the Mayan Great Cycle. There were many predictions of what might happen: many felt that this would be the date of the end of the world; or, it would be a time of major earth disasters, space changes, and mythical planets invading our galaxy, along with strange Milky Way alignments. There were talks of a pole flip that would cause problems all over the earth, and some said it would mark the beginning of a New World Age.
VROOM!: vSphere 5.1 IOPS Performance Characterization on Flash-based Storage
At VMworld 2012 we
demonstrated a single eight-way VM running on vSphere 5.1 exceeding one million IOPS. This testing illustrated the high end IOPS performance of vSphere 5.1.
In a new series of tests we have completed some additional characterization of high I/O performance using a very similar environment. The only difference between the 1 million IOPS test environment and the one used for these tests is that the number of Violin Memory Arrays was reduced from two to one (one of the arrays was a short term loan).
Last month,
VMware Cloud Applications Marketplace alongside
a new Bounty Program for Hyperic and an
updated one for Spring Insight. With all this investment, customers are right to interpret that VMware is serious about developing a steady stream of new plugins that will help organizations place their cloud-based applications under management faster.
VMware Virtualization Management Blog: The Definition of “Cross Platform Cloud Applications”
Cross platform software programs have historically been the ideal for both ISVs and IT.
Of course, the
concept has been around a while and has proven it’s value. In a nutshell, it allows software programs to have a wider reach and serve more customers. The portability makes it inherently more useful, and, for software vendors, expands revenue potential.
VMware Horizon Tech Blog: How to enable SSL in Horizon Application Manager 1.5
Here’s a detailed step by step guide on how to enable a Wildcard certificate in Horizon Application Manager 1.5.
There are many different ways you can accomplish this but this will get the job done..
How to enable SSL in Horizon Application Manager – wildcard v2
The goal of the
Software-defined Datacenter (SDDC) is that every datacenter function can be delivered as a service on any cloud at any time. At a basic level, this implies that these services need to have a high level of reuse in order to truly be multi-cloud capable and fit into the SDDC mantra.
Office of the CTO Blogs: Paravirtual RDMA for Low Latency and Flexibility
The Office of the CTO has been exploring how to best enable application access to RDMA for those applications requiring the ultimate in high bandwidth, low-latency communication, which includes many HPC MPI applications as well as many scale-out databases and BigData approaches.
: #EXTERNAL-BLOGS
Upgrading vCenter Server? Use the free VMware Tool called vCenter Pre-Upgrade Checker
If you’re planning, or upgrading vCenter server, you might want to know that there is a free tool provided by VMware, which enables you to check the DB before running the installer. The VMware vCenter Pre-Upgrade Checker not only detects problems, but also miss-configuration and can avoid performance problems after the upgrade.
Most hypervisors now have, or will have, support for SR-IOV networking —
VMware introduced support in vSphere 5.1. One of the downsides of using this technology, which provides direct network access to a virtual machine, is that it hinders mobility — vMotion is no longer possible. The new Hyper-V works around this limitation by temporarily routing I/O through a virtual switch during live migration. Ingenious, no?
Faking an SSD in your virtualized vSphere lab
I have written about
this before (and so has
William Lam, so all credits go to William), but I wanted to note down these commands for my own use as I find myself digging around often for the same commands these days. So what is my goal: Faking an SSD in my virtualized vSphere lab.
Virtualized Oracle Databases on UCS
Some time ago I wrote an article about EMC’s
Blueprint for Successful Large Scale Oracle Virtualization on vSphere. Now Cisco IT has published a similar whitepaper and study after having virtualized a large number of their corporate Oracle databases on top of their Unified Computing System (UCS) platform. The results are quite impressive in my opinion and you may be able to learn a lot from their effort. The difference here is that Cisco tested with NFS and D-NFS, not Fibre Channel (as in the EMC case study).
Heads Up! Storage DRS scheduler removes rules
One of my friends over in VMware support just gave me a heads-up on this issue. It affects virtual machines with anti-affinity VMDK rules defined (for keeping virtual machine disks on different datastores in a datastore cluster) when changing the Storage DRS automation level via scheduled tasks. The rule will be removed if you use the Storage DRS scheduler to change Storage DRS automation level from automatic to manual and then back to automatic. The result is that a VM which had an anti-affinity rule and has its VMDKs on different datastores could end up with its VMDKs on the same datastore after the scheduler runs.
How to find objects in vSphere Web client – the fastest way
The New vSphere Web client might not be the way that many admins use to do things in vSphere. In fact it’s been very very long time we have been all working through the vSphere Windows client, so the change to the vSphere Web client aren’t obvious. And so like many others I keep doing things both ways. Through the old Windows client and also through the new vSphere Web client. The Web client is build to scale, to handle 400 or more sessions. VMware says that the old Windows client could not keep up so that’s why it progressively will be replaced and the old Widnows client will fade out. Already all the new features (like the
vSphere enhanced vMotion) are present only through the vSphere Web client. So How to find objects in vSphere Web client?
VMware instructional videos freely available on vmwarelearning.com
You can grow your IT skills with free training, expertise, and insights on VMware products, all in one convenient location.
VMware has released some great instructional videos – freely accessible, these short technical videos allow VMware technical experts to provide tips and step-by-step instructions on product features, design best practices, configuring, deploying and running your virtual infrastructure.
Auto LUN Discovery on ESXi hosts
Did you know that any newly presented LUNs/paths added to an already discovered target will automatically be discovered by your ESXi host without a rescan of the SAN? In this example, I currently see two iSCSI LUNs from my NetApp array:
Percentage Based Admission Control gives lower VM restart guarantee?
Those who have configured vSphere HA have all seen that section where it asks if you want to use admission control or not. Of course if you decide you want to use it, and you should want this, then the next question that comes is which one do you want to use? I have always preferred the “Percentage Based Admission Control” policy. For some reason though there are people who think that the percentage based admission control policy rules out large VMs from being restarted or offers a lower guarantee.
Yesterday I read
Balance multiple View Connection Servers using HAProxy and realized that I have not published a recommendation for VMware View health monitoring. The most common types of health monitoring are ICMP and HTTP.
VOMA – Found X actively heartbeating hosts on device
One of the long-awaited features introduced with vSphere 5.1 was
VOMA (vSphere On-disk Metadata Analyzer). This is essentially a filesystem checker for both the VMFS metadata and the LVM (Logical Volume Manager). Now, if you have an outage either at the host or storage side, you have a mechanism to verify the integrity of your filesystems once everything comes back up. This gives you peace of mind when wondering if everything is ok after the outage. There is a requirement however to have the VMFS volume quiesced when running the VOMA utility. This post will look at some possible reasons for VOMA to report that it found hosts actively heartbeating on the datastore even when there are no running VMs.
Automating ESXi host level changes without opening SSH
I have been asked by many if it is possible automating ESXi host level changes without opening SSH. In many organizations people are prohibited to open SSH however they do have the need to make certain changes on a host level. One of those changes for instance is in a stretched cluster environment where “disk.terminateVMOnPDLDefault” needs to be set to true. This setting can only be configured in /etc/vmware/settings unfortunately. So how do you automate this?
How-to save resource pool tree before disabling DRS to be able to restore the hierarchy
In vSphere 5.1 is possible to retain configuration of the cluster’s resource tree. In previous releases, like the vSphere 5.0 this feature wasn’t available. The feature is available through the new
vSphere Web client only. Web client which has been enhanced, improved, and brought wider functions, than the classic Windows vSphere client.
Error while adding NFS mount: NFS connection limit reached!
The advanced setting
SunRPC.MaxConnPerIP defines the maximum number of unique TCP connections that can be opened for a given IP address. This is of particular interest to users of NFS. If the number of mounts to an IP address is more than SunRPC.MaxConnPerIP, then the existing connections for NFS mounts are shared with new mounts from the same IP address. Currently VMware supports a maximum of 128 unique TCP connections per ESXi host but also supports up to 256 mounts per host. So what options are available to configure ESXi hosts to allow the maximum number of NFS mounts?
Upgrade vCloud Director 1.5 on vSphere 5.1 to vCD 5.1.1?
One of my colleagues,
Matthew Meyer, posted a list of cool videos he produced. These videos show how to upgrade vCloud Director 1.5 on vSphere 5.0 to vCloud Director 5.1.1 running on vSphere 5.1. Nice right?! Thanks Matt for creating these, awesome work. (I normally don’t use the “read more” option, but as there are 8 videos in total I will only show two on the front page. Hit “Continue Reading” if you want to see the rest!)
ESXi host disconnected from vCenter?
I noticed a couple of people reported this problem in the last two months so I figured a blog post would be useful. This
thread on VMTN triggered this article. If your ESXi host is disconnected from vCenter (even 5.0 and 5.1 appear to be impacted by this) and you see error messages in your log files about free space like these:
How cool is that: VM console screenshots just by browser
Recently William Lam posted about a lesser known vSphere feature that I was not yet aware of: You can produce and look at screenshots of your VMs
just by pointing a web browser to your ESXi host or vCenter server. If you have already read his post you will probably agree that this is very cool, but you might also wonder what this can be actually used for. So I want to share this knowledge again while adding some useful comments ... and use cases.
How-to restrict VMs in VMware Workstation 9
has the possibility to restrict VMs. But How-to restrict VMs in VMware Workstation 9, and for which use cases? The first thing that I have in mind is learning. You might want to restrict a modification for VM which is preconfigured with specific hardware, and distribute this VM to the students. optionally, there is an option to obligatory change the encryption password after the VM is copied or moved somewhere else.
Reduce Windows Server License count in VMware View
One of the many features available in VMware View 5.1 is the ability to implement VMware View Composer in a Standalone Server. VMware View Composer is the software piece responsible for creating Linked Clone desktops and since VMware View 5.1 can be deployed on a server other than the vCenter Server. Read more about View Composer at
VMware View 4.5 Linked Cloning explained. This move is aiming towards a highly scalable VMware View architecture.
New Training Course - VMware vSphere: Skills for Operators [V5.1]
VMware is about to release a new training course. The vSphere Skills for Operators is a two-day technical classroom training course designed to help the operators and administrators to create and manage virtual machines. This two-day lecture and lab course will help students gain the skills required to work effectively with VMware virtual machines. This course is based on VMware vSphere ESXi 5.1 and VMware vCenter Server 5.1. After completing this course, students may enroll for other advanced vSphere courses.
VMware vCenter Operations Manager - Attributes and KPI Demonstration
vCenter Operations Manager defines attributes that are critical to the performance of an object as key performance indicators (KPI). KPI are weighted more heavily in the calculations that determine the health of an object. Graphs of KPI performance appear before other metrics in several areas of the product.
VMware Free Training for Security – 1h Online, Self-Paced
New free training course from VMware, which is available online. Note that an account at VMware Learning required at
VMware Education, but you can register for free there. You’ll be able to learn about VMware Security Suite which is available as a part of the
vSphere Essentislas Plus package as a
VMware vCloud Networking and Security 5.1.2.
vCenter Server 5.1.0b Released
This is a follow-up to my previous
post on the 5.0U2. At the same time, VMware also released
vCenter 5.1.0b. This post will look at the storage items which were addressed in that update, although the issues that are addressed in the storage space are relatively minor compared to the enhancements made in other areas. Note that this update is for vCenter only – there is no ESXi 5.1 update.
VMware HA Cluster – how it works
When HA cluster is first created the VMs are configured with cluster default settings concerning the VM restart priority, host isolation response, and VM monitoring. But it can be changed, and you can specify specific behavior for each virtual machine. You can for example change this settings for some high priority VMs, like your domain controller VMs etc, which needs to be started before anything else.
vCloud Director and Storage DRS default Affinity
I have had multiple discussions about Storage DRS default affinity internally and now saw this question on the
VMTN Community Forums. It is a long question, but basically it comes down to this:
View VSA Recompose Time Issue & Workaround
The View Storage Accelerator (aka VSA or CBRC) feature is part of vSphere 5 and later and is used by VMware View. VSA helps to address some of the performance bottlenecks and the increase storage cost for VDI. CBRC is a 100% host-based RAM-Based caching solution that helps to reduce read IOs issued to the storage subsystem and thus improves scalability while being completely transparent to guest OSs.
vCOPS Training from TrainSignal Released – by Jason Nash and Joe Kelly
New vCOPS training has been released by TrainSignal. As a teachers, Jason Nash and Joe Kelly. Both from Warrow. There is 18 learning lessons in this training course called
VMware vCenter Operations Manager Implementation. You’ll learn all about the Install, configure, about the vCOPS architecture, licensing… The vCOPS essential edition is available together with the
Essentials Plus and Standard versions.
Trouble Recomposing View 5.x Desktops After Upgrade to vSphere 5.0 U2
I’ve finally gotten around to upgrading my View environment from 5.0 to 5.1.2. Just before I attempted the upgrade I also applied the latest patches to all my hosts taking them up to vSphere 5.0 U2. This is where some fun started, but fortunately to avoid some of this fun the solution is very easy.
Cool Tool - ESXi Host Backup & Restore GUI Utility
There are a couple of improvements in 1.2 based on feedback received in the comments
Sean Duffy has received about the utility. The main improvement introduces a function in the script which backs the GUI to check that ESX hosts are valid before attempting to backup or restore these.
What’s new in VMware SRM 5.1.0.1 and 5.0.2
Together with the
recent release of vCenter 5.1b, there has been new release of VMware Site Recovery Manger (SRM). The SRM 5.1.0.1 is an update for the SRM 5.1 release and the 5.0.2 is an update for the older 5.0.1 release (in case you’re on the release before upgrading to the 5.1.x).
The Official VCAP5-DCD Cert Guide
Ace your VCAP5-DCD, demonstrate your exceptional knowledge of VMware virtualized datacenter design, and differentiate yourself from thousands of VMware professionals! The Official VCAP5-DCD Cert Guide is the only VMware authorized and approved guide to the new VCAP5-DCD certification exam for datacenter virtualization designers. Authored by top VMware expert Paul McSharry, it thoroughly covers every new exam objective, helping you sharpen your skills in designing and integrating multi-site, large enterprise virtualized environments.
Creating an EagerZeroedThick disk with PowerCLI
Hey…. - that is not possible – I hear you say – well in principle you are right. Up until today…
By mistake of course – I found that there was a change made to the
5.1 release of
PowerCLI– but this change has not been documented anywhere – which I think is a shame. This post is the only public reference I know of.
VMware vSphere Performance: Solving CPU, Memory, Storage, and Networking Issues
This book for VMware admins is about performance and about how to solve some VMware vSphere 5 Performance issues. Solving CPU, Memory, Storage, and Networking Issues can be challenging. This book, with a step-by-step instructions, will show you how to solve some critical performance issues in vSphere.
vCloud Connector 2.0
is now available for download now. vCloud Connector (vCC) allows you to view, copy and manage VMs across vSphere and vCloud Director, but also to public vCloud offers.
There are two versions of the vCloud Connector, where the free version called Core does lucks the Automatic catalog synchronization across clouds and migrating of VMs while maintaining IP and MAC addresses.
: #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.
: #EDUCATION
VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.0 Tips Vidcast
This
vidcast from VMware Press author Michael Laverick discusses key tips from his book,
Administering VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.0– the complete, technical, hands-on guide to VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) 5.0 installation and configuration for experienced VMware professionals.
: #SUPPORT
- VMWARE SUPPORT INSIDER
ALERT: Performance history for Past Year may contain only 30 days
VMware has become aware of an issue that may occur whereby only one month of performance history appears when trying to see the past year in vSphere 5.1
Specifically, the symptoms are:
- You see only the last 30 days of performance history in the ‘past year’ view
- Only one month of performance history appears when trying to see the past year
We urge you to read the official KB article for more details:
Performance history for Past Year may contain only 30 days of information in vSphere 5.1 (2042164).
Implementing vSphere Metro Storage Cluster using EMC VPLEX
EMC VPLEX is a federated solution that provides simultaneous access to storage devices at two geographically separate sites. This short informational presentation provides a quick review of EMC VPLEX and information about deploying a Metro Storage Cluster across two datacenters using EMC VPLEX Metro 5.0 and above. With vSphere 5.0, a Storage Virtualization Device can be supported in a Metro Storage cluster configuration.
: #KB-ARTICLES
Please consider checking -
http://blogs.vmware.com/kbdigest/ regularly for new and updated KB Articles.
VMware Knowledge Base Weekly Digest: New Articles Published for Week Ending 1/5/13
VMware Blogs 8/01/13 1:26 AM
Shavlik NetChk Protect
VMware vCenter Protect Agent trace logging (2042112) Date Published: 1/4/2013
VMware ESX
Determining the correct driver for ESXi/ESX host I/O devices (HBA) (2035955) Date Published: 1/3/2013
VMware ESXi
Date Published: 1/3/2013 Host Management Network becomes unavailable after migrating from ESX to ESXi (2021959)
Date Published: 1/4/2013
VMware Go
Cannot schedule patch scans using VMware Go (2031920) Date Published: 1/3/2013
Updating and verifying the version of the hf7b.xml file that is currently being used to scan in VMware Go (2031931) Date Published: 1/3/2013
VMware Service Manager
Reopening a Service Manager call via an incoming email assigns the call to the officer who has sent the email (2041801) Date Published: 1/3/2013
Changing the screen set of a Service Manager call by changing the type tier displays incorrect custom field values (2042074) Date Published: 1/3/2013
Saving an attachment from the Service Manager call history with name containing a + symbol results in an empty file (2042098) Date Published: 1/3/2013
Integration scans in Service Manager fail with the error: Operation took too long in VMware Service Manager 9.x (2042232) Date Published: 1/4/2013
VMware vCenter Configuration Manager
VCM 5.6 API cannot connect to the HTTP invoker remote service at http://localhost:8080/ (2038323) Date Published: 1/2/2013
Machine name validation fails in vCloud Director during VCM collections of data from licensed Chinese or German locale machines (2040727) Date Published: 1/2/2013
VCM upgrade might fail due to Auto-License setting (2040879) Date Published: 1/2/2013
Cannot delete snapshot and preserve child snapshots when virtual machine has 18 or more snapshots (2041076) Date Published: 1/3/2013
Patches stored in /tmp directory on Mac OS X cannot be found (2041083) Date Published: 1/3/2013
Cannot download patches when download location contains non-ASCII or extended ASCII characters (2041084) Date Published: 1/3/2013
SCAP bundles with non-ASCII characters in the name cannot be imported (2041325) Date Published: 1/3/2013
Startup script changes not logged under change management (2041326) Date Published: 1/3/2013
VCM Remote Client installation fails on Chinese locale operating systems when path contains extended ASCII characters (2041812) Date Published: 1/3/2013
Cannot provision Windows Server 2008 R2 from an image made on a Chinese locale operating system (2041814) Date Published: 1/3/2013
Cannot import SCAP benchmarks in 3-tier installations (2041817) Date Published: 1/3/2013
VMware vCenter Orchestrator
Scheduled workflows in vCenter Orchestrator fail with the error: Unable to execute a workflow, userToken is null (2041733) Date Published: 1/4/2013
VMware vCenter Orchestrator Appliance
Configuring SSO authentication fails with the error: Error communicating to the remote server https://vcenter_fqdn:7444/ims/STSService (2041898) Date Published: 1/3/2013
VMware vCenter Protect Essentials Plus
Obtaining trace logs for VMware vCenter Protect Configuration Management 4.3.x (2042110) Date Published: 1/2/2013
VMware vCenter Protect Agent components (2042137) Date Published: 1/4/2013
VMware vCenter Server
Searching the vCenter Server 5.0 Inventory fails (2021812) Date Published: 1/4/2013
VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat
Permissions associated with vCenter Server Heartbeat Clients (2042214) Date Published: 1/2/2013
VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager
Changing the vCenter Server user name and password used while installing SRM and configuring VRMS (2040031) Date Published: 12/31/2012
VMware vCloud Connector
Upgrading vCloud Connector Server and Nodes from 1.5 to 2.0 causes loss of Node, vCenter Server, and Cloud configurations (2042016) Date Published: 1/3/2013
vCenter Server plugin is missing after upgrading vCloud Connector Server and Nodes from v1.5 to v2.0 (2042017) Date Published: 1/3/2013
VMware vCloud Networking and Security
Upgrading to vCloud Director 5.1 reports the error: Not Licensed for Entity (2041974) Date Published: 1/2/2013
VMware vFabric Hyperic Server
Hyperic log tracking creates events for old log messages (2011846) Date Published: 1/4/2013
WebSphere plug-in on Windows returns the error: Invalid configuration (2040867) Date Published: 12/31/2012
Members are not displayed in a group of groups in vFabric Hyperic 4.6.x (2035502) Date Published: 1/4/2013
Performance of some Hyperic dashboard portlets is poor (2040866) Date Published: 12/31/2012
VMware View Manager
Recreating a View desktop from a Detached Persistent Disk fails with the error: Invalid input parameter cSpec.NewDiskSpec.DatastorePath for desktop provisioning (2042072) Date Published: 1/4/2013
vCenter Server user privileges missing in the VMware View Installation document are required for certain View features (2042161) Date Published: 1/2/2013
VMware vSphere Web Services SDK
Updates to vSphere Web Services SDK Documentation (2042336) Date Published: 1/3/2013
Zimbra Collaboration Server
Best practices for provisioning users in Zimbra with a username not related to the main account email address (2039906) Date Published: 1/2/2013
Folder flags available in Zimbra (2040823) Date Published: 1/2/2013