By Hugo Strydom, Management Consultant, VMware Professional Services

In this part we will look at some scenarios and what will happen when a pNIC is saturated.

Scenario 1:

ESX host with 2x 1Gb pNIC's that is attached to a vDS . pNIC0 is above 75% threshold.

• LBT will calculate to evaluate which vNIC traffic can be moved off pNIC0 to pNIC1
• As part of the calculation LBT will also determine that if a vNIC is moved over to pNIC1 it will not saturate pNIC1

 

Scenario 2 :

 

ESX host with 3x 1Gb pNIC's that is attached to a vDS. pNIC0 and pNIC1 is above the 75% threshold.

• Only pNIC2 will be considered for traffic to be moved onto.

 

Scenario 3 :

 

ESX host with 2x 1Gb pNIC's, 2 Port Groups, PG1 have been set to use LBT and PG2 have been set to use "Virtual Port ID".

• LBT will look at the total load on the pNIC and not just the load that the VM's attached to PG2 have.
• All VM's that is attached on PG1 will not be moved to other pNIC's, only the VM's that is connected to PG2 (LTB Port Group) will be considered to be moved between pNIC's.

Looking at Scenario 3 one should be careful not to configure or design vDS port groups on the same pNIC's with different Port Group Load Balance policies. It could have a negative effect on performance and lead to overloading of load on pNIC's.

The wave of VMware customers looking to virtualize Exchange 2010 on vSphere continues to accelerate. While there have been customers who have chosen not to virtualize the DAG nodes, the reasons were not those we heard of in years past. Today it's not because of performance or high storage IO, in fact most customers believe that the majority of their applications can be virtualized, including their business critical applications. VMware customers who chose to postpone virtualization of their Exchange 2010 DAG nodes mostly did so for one reason :lack of support for vSphere advanced features from Microsoft. Those customers will be pleased to know that this is now a thing of the past.

With Microsoft's latest announcement of enhanced hardware virtualization support for Exchange 2010 customers looking to deploy a virtualized Exchange 2010 environment and take advantage of vSphere features such as vMotion, VMware HA and DRS can do so with full support from Microsoft and VMware. VMware has been officially supporting the use of these vSphere features along with Exchange 2010 DAGs for some time now, as described in our KB article here. The additional support by Microsoft simply validates what we've been promoting since the release of our Exchange 2010 on VMware documentation available here.

As news of this validation and support begins to pick up steam we anticipate that questions will come up as to what are the best practices for making sure your deployments are successful. To help provide our customers with some insight into using these features with their production Exchange 2010 DAG clusters we've put together a whitepaper outlining testing we performed in our labs earlier this year. The purpose of testing outlined in Using VMware HA, DRS and vMotion with Exchange 2010 DAGs was to:

• Validate the use case of combining VMware HA with Exchange DAGs to reduce the time required to re-establish DAG availability.
• Validate the use of vMotion with Exchange DAGs to allow the use of DRS and proactive workload migration while maintaining database availability and integrity.
• Provide guidance and best practices for taking advantage of these vSphere features.

The whitepaper can be found here: http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/solutions/VMware-Using-HA-DRS-vMotion-with-Exchange-2010-DAGs.pdf

It shouldn't come as much surprise that the results we came up with and documented are in line with what Microsoft themselves are recommending, further validating our results. Additionally this whitepaper will provide guidance for customers looking to use features such as DRS to allow their vSphere environment to efficiently balance workloads and manage resources and VMware HA to provide even higher levels of availability.

This will no doubt begin driving up the number of virtualized DAGs out there, so help out your fellow vSphere and Exchange administrators. Join the Exchange, Domino and RIM VMware User Community!

-alex

Alex Fontana, Technical Solutions Architect

In April I introduced VMware’s acquisition of  SlideRocket with a  blog entry entitled, “The New Way to Work – End-User Computing in the Post-PC Era”. Today I am happy to announce the next step in this journey with our acquisition of  Socialcast, a powerful “Enterprise Activity Stream Engine” that unites a company’s people, information, and applications in real-time. In this blog, I discuss this social platform and how it helps evolve the way we work.

First, let’s step back and look at today’s approach to enterprise communication. For the last 30 years, personal computing has primarily focused on automating the metaphors of the pre-digitized workplace including the “inbox” and “outbox” tray, manila folders, and printed documents. We’ve largely replaced printed memos, mail carts, and filing cabinets with documents, email, and file shares. These tools have dramatically improved our productivity, but the increasing volume of information can be overwhelming and requires manual prioritization and organizational work to keep up with this data deluge.

Continue reading "The New Way to Work... Part 2"

By John Orbaugh ; Director of Technology Services, Tyler Independent School District

My name is John Orbaugh and I’m the Technology Director for the Tyler Independent School District in Tyler, Texas.  I’ve been asked to write a blog about our experience of selecting, testing, purchasing and deploying a virtual desktop solution in our school district.  More about that in a minute, but first let me tell you a little about who we are. 

We are a K-12 public school made up of over 18,500 students, 2,300 employees and 30 instructional campuses.  We’re a pretty diverse community with very wealthy to very poor families.  Over 65% of our students are economically disadvantaged and we have a rapidly growing Hispanic population.  All in all we’re probably a typical school district.  I’m approaching my 17 ^thyear in the district.  I began my career in Tyler ISD by building the district’s first networks back in the heady days of campus based Novell file servers and T1 circuits.  Today we centrally host over 120 VMware based virtual servers, 96 Tb of storage and have 1 Gb fiber connecting all campuses and district facilities. 

We do have a number of challenges facing us with budget cutbacks from the Texas legislature.  As of this moment it appears that our district will be dealing with a budget reduction of up to $11 Million.  The good news is that we have known for some time now that this was coming.  Our challenge now is to determine how as a district we will be able to provide our students with the computers they need in classrooms and labs.  We have 4,000 student computers in our district and many of them are nearing nine to ten years of use.  Well past the time to replace them.  How can we afford to replace these systems during a time of severe budget reductions?  How could I make old technology new again?

For our district the solution is to convert our existing fleet of aging PCs into thin client devices.  I have been interested in this technology as a way of opening our doors to greater student access to instructional resources for many years now.  I wanted our students to have access to what they needed anytime they were ready to learn.  My staff and I tried this concept out five years ago, but found that our instructional software lacked the maturity to work well in this environment and the available technology and protocols just weren’t up to the task.  Since I couldn’t control that issue, we set about upgrading and standardizing our instructional software packages with an emphasis on finding web based, or at least server based, applications that would play nicer in a thin client arena.  Five years later the technology to support our dream has finally arrived, but what terrible timing!  Could I convince our district’s leadership and Board of Trustees to invest the funds to enable us to move a virtual desktop project forward at a time when the legislature is preparing to lop $11 Million from our budget? I knew we had our work cut out for us, but if I could prove that the technology would work and save us money we would be able to move the project forward. 

We knew who the players were in this realm so finding technology offerings wasn’t the problem.  The question was, “What will work for us given our combination of network, applications and antique PCs?”  To get started we connected with a top consulting firm and signed them up to provide a small proof of concept deployment of about five systems.  We were, by the way, able to get this work done at zero cost to the district. Show me what you can do and then we’ll talk about money.  The PoC was enough to let us begin to get a feel for the capabilities of the consultants, develop a little experience with the software and determine how well our old computers would perform.  What we learned from the proof of concept was extremely encouraging.  We found that a PC purchased in April 2002, (Intel Pentium 4 processor with 256Mb RAM) could simultaneously operate Windows 7, MS Office 2010 Pro, IE8 and stream video perfectly just like a brand new PC.  It was an Ezekiel like moment as these old dead relics of PCs had new life breathed into them and became useful once again.  In fact it worked so well that I decided to try a “Pepsi Challenge” with the district’s leadership team and our Board of Trustees.  Could they tell the difference in a blind test between a thin device and a standard PC?

I had my network staff configure a thin PC and a modern one with the same exact software loads.  I set them up side by side and then proceeded to cover the CPUs with a box and draped them in black so only the monitors, keyboards and mouses were exposed.  At our next Leadership Team meeting I trumpeted the glories of thin client computing and then issued the challenge to them to come and give the systems a try to see if they could tell the difference.  One or two at a time they would wander by my office to try the systems out.  They would watch the video and listen to the sound quality on each, type a Word document, pull up a website and wiggle the mouse around.  This was followed by little head scratching and either a wild guess or just saying they gave up.  I then set up the same test at our next Board meeting and issued the same challenge to the Trustees.  Same result.  Of course that was exactly what I wanted to prove. 

The next order of business was to secure the funding for a broader test.

To be continued…

By: Matt Sarrel

Tomorrow at 8:00am Pacific Time, iland cloud infrastructure will be hosting a live webinar to discuss how you can integrate your existing VMware vSphere or VMware vCloud Director environment with iland vCloud Services using the VMware vCloud Connector.  

The vCloud Connector plug-in allows you to integrate external and internal cloud environments in order to migrate virtual machines and virtual apps back and forth or to cloudburst if necessary. You also get a single interface through which you can manage public and private clouds.

Iland is one of the first cloud services to earn the distinction of becoming vCloud Powered. This means that iland’s services are based on VMware vSphere and vCloud Director and use the vCloud API and support for Open Virtualization Format (OVF) so virtual machine images can easily be uploaded and downloaded. VMware and iland are both committed to this, in fact, last year VMware awarded iland the Service Provider Partner of the Year award.  

The important thing is that we’re now beginning to see unification in the management of public and private clouds.  This paves the way for the most likely usage scenario for most medium and large business: a hybrid (public/private/hosted private) cloud.  

By choosing a vCloud Powered designated Service Provider, you can be assured the Service Provider has made the commitment and investment to offer their cloud computing solutions and services expertise in conjunction with VMware’s virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions. This provides a comprehensive, market-leading virtualization and cloud infrastructure offering for your business and technical needs.

Be sure to follow @VMwareSP for live tweets during tomorrow’s webinar, as well as the @iland_cloud handle for future updates. 

By: Matt Sarrel

I was browsing the web this morning and I came across a white paper, VMware vCloud Director: Build Secure Private Clouds to Deliver Infrastructure as a Service. Although this document is geared towards private clouds, it is equally valid in public cloud deployments.

VMware vCloud Director gives customers the ability to build secure private clouds that dramatically increase datacenter efficiency and business agility. Coupled with VMware vSphere, the best platform for cloud infrastructures, VMware vCloud Director delivers cloud computing for existing datacenters by pooling virtual infrastructure resources and delivering them to users as catalog-based services.

VMware vCloud Director is also touted as having the following key benefits:

• Increase business agility by empowering users to deploy preconfigured or custom-built services with the click of a button.
• Maintain security and control over multi-tenant environments with policy-based user controls and VMware vShield security technologies.
• Reduce costs by efficiently delivering resources to internal organizations as virtual datacenters to increase consolidation and simplify management.
• Leverage existing investments and open standards to ensure interoperability and application portability between clouds.

Let's see what those mean when it comes to actual virtual environment operations.

Preconfigured and custom-built services form the basis of the self-provisioning cloud. In this way, an administrator can configure several core VM's and then allow users to bring them up or down as needed without having to configure them. By removing the step where an admin has to configure a VM, an internal or external cloud can help your business shift gears with respect to IT much faster than the previous paradigm of one app to one server.

Security in VMware vCloud Director does provide control for multi-tenant user environments through policy based user controls (who can do what with what and when) and VMware vShield (think of this as something like a virtual firewall that keeps different environments separate within a big multi-tenant cloud).

I'll skip the bullet point that vCloud Director reduces costs by increasing efficiency. I'm not sure there's anyone left who would argue that virtual environments decrease efficiency, although there's always at least one person willing to argue about anything via Twitter (I'm @msarrel for those who want to start something).

The last bullet point is where it gets really interesting, especially in the context of Virtacore's vCloud offering. Application portability between clouds. That sounds pretty good, doesn't it? Look at the evolution - first we had apps running on servers, then apps running on VM's on servers, then apps running on multiple servers within a cloud, and now we've got apps running on multiple clouds.

The idea of cloudbursting, where excess load is pushed beyond the internal cloud and out to the external/public when it is needed, is particularly interesting. For example, a sales group might have an internal cloud running CRM and order management applications. At the end of the quarter, when orders are coming in like mad, IT can transparently utilize an external cloud to handle the additional capacity. VMware vCloud Director makes this possible by establishing firewall rules between your public cloud instances and the rest of the world so that only your employees can access your VM's, plus it makes moving and on-the-fly provisioning easier and faster.

This is where I think Virtacore’s vCloud offering is going to get really interesting, because the management interface can be used to cloudburst almost as easily as dragging and dropping.

Matthew D. Sarrel (or Matt Sarrel) is executive director of  Sarrel Group , a technology product testing, editorial services, and technical marketing consulting company.  He also holds editorial positions at pcmag.com, eweek, GigaOM, and Allbusiness.com, and blogs at  TopTechDog .

Here is our Top 20 KB list for May 2011. This list is ranked by the number of times a VMware Support Service Request was resolved by following the steps in a published Knowledge Base article.

• Enhanced VMotion Compatibility (EVC) processor support (1003212)
• Troubleshooting VMware High Availability (HA) (1001596)
• Best practices for using and troubleshooting VMware Converter (1004588)
• Enabling syslog on ESXi (1016621)
• Restarting the Management agents on an ESX or ESXi Server (1003490)
• Unpresenting a LUN containing a datastore from ESX 4.x and ESXi 4.x (1015084)
• Virtual machine does not power on because of locked files (10051)
• Purging old data from the database used by vCenter Server 4.x (1025914)
• Collecting diagnostic information for VMware vCloud Director (1026312)
• ESX/ESXi 4.x handling of LUNs detected as snapshot (1011387)
• Recreating a missing virtual machine disk (VMDK) descriptor file (1002511)
• Virtual machines in an invalid state fail to power on with the error: FoundryVMDirectlyOpenSocketToVMX: Failed to create socket pair (1035564)
• Virtual machines stop responding when any LUN on the host is in an all-paths-down condition (APD) (1016626)
• Manually deleting linked clones or stale virtual desktop entries from VMware View Manager (1008658)
• Collecting diagnostic information for Lab Manager 4.x (1012324)
• Updating rollup jobs after the error: Performance data is currently not available for this entity (1004382)
• VMware Capacity Planner Enterprise or Collection Dashboard does not display data for a Project (1034417)
• Creating a persistent scratch location for ESXi (1033696)
• Downloading and Installing VMware Fusion (1005466)
• ESX 4.x host fails to boot after power operation with the error: fsck.ext3: Unable to resolve UUID (1017162)

NYSE Technologies (a unit of NYSE Euronext) announced their new "community platform" cloud computing service today, running on vSphere and vCloud Director from VMware. The target customers for the service are capital markets organizations such as hedge funds and the trading departments of banks, with initial customers including a unit of Goldman Sachs and the hedge fund Millenium Partners.

Customers of the new cloud compute service get credentials for the infrastructure portal (vCloud Director) with access exclusively through NYSE's  SFTI (Secure Financial Transaction Infrastructure), a dedicated, secure and high capacity network. There they can deploy a choice of virtual machine (VM) templates on demand to run their capital markets applications. The service ensures that the VM is automatically "plumbed in" to NYSE's multicasted real-time market feeds & applications, SFTI network, and high performance EMC VNX storage. The net? Customers can focus on developing proprietary advantage with their applications instead of worrying about the plumbing. Both dedicated and multitenant versions are offered, with tenants being securely segregated using vCloud Director's Virtual Data Center (VDC) capability.

NYSE's service is innovative in several ways. NYSE Euronext is primarily known for being a financial exchange as well as a provider of market data, rather than as a cloud provider. So why start offering cloud computing? NYSE saw how it could significantly simplify and improve its customers' competitiveness in capital markets by providing an integrated service that combined on-demand computing with access to the market (the exchanges), a low-latency secure network and instant access to data feeds. In a reversal of traditional approaches to IT, computing capacity is literally coming to the market and the data -- rather than the data and market being piped to the computers.

So, why is this better, and why is NYSE Technologies the right organization to deliver? For hedge funds and other buy-side firms, their value isn't in integrating compute, storage, networks and security -- it's in analytics, trading strategies, algorithms, application strategies and other proprietary expertise. The NYSE service means those IT organizations no longer have to struggle with integrating data dumps and feeds into their infrastructure and operations. Trade execution speed can be critical, so physical location and proximity to the market matters. NYSE's experience in operating large scale, mission-critical VMware-based infrastructure -- the NYSE and Euronext exchanges -- is unquestionable.

The cloud infrastructure involved is anything but commodity: trading applications require high performance, high throughput, strong security and sophisticated network connectivity. It's the integration of this with all of the other critical infrastructure components, data, markets and other services that delivers the value. So what's controversial about this? Recently, cloud pundits have trumpeted what seems to be a depressingly grim dystopian view of the future where all computing runs on vast monolithic "no-frills" VM farms at rock-bottom prices. In this world, any differentiation or variation in infrastructure is sacrificed on the altar of lowest possible cost per VM. After all, profitability at huge volume can only come from ruthless standardization.

In contrast, NYSE represents an alternative cloud future: one that contains a vibrant ecosystem of clouds, both internal IT departments and external cloud service providers, with unique understanding and focus on customer needs, married with the ability to deliver through scalable, on-demand and trustworthy IT services. What internal IT organizations and cloud providers like NYSE share is a rejection of the concept of an inflexible cloud monoculture. Instead, they choose to build high performance, secure and scalable infrastructure because it meets critical business needs. They obsessively focus on value delivered to the customer and never confuse that with cost of service.

In some ways, IT infrastructure is like a currency -- the only qualification required is that it is accepted as such by its users. Building IT infrastructure that doesn't meet customer needs leads to irrelevance and adoption of a foreign currency. There's no one size fits all answer, which is something to consider when crafting your own cloud strategy and selecting cloud providers to compliment your own IT skills and capabilities.

This is the third post in my migrating to ESXi series.  In the first post I talked about the need to upgrade vCenter and provided some tips to ensure a smooth upgrade.  In the second post I talked about the need to evacuate VMs off the ESX host and called out special consideration needed for VMs running on boot disk and other local datastores.  This time I will talk about the steps to install ESXi and reconfigure the host after the ESXi migration.

Installing ESXi
Once vCenter has been upgraded and all the VMs have been migrated off your ESX hosts you are ready to install ESXi.  To install ESXi you simply boot the host from the ESXi installation media and follow the prompts to accept the license agreement and select the target boot disk. 

I strongly recommend that before installing ESXi you take some time to document the ESX host configuration using the Host Configuration Worksheet as a guide.  This will ensure you have a good reference available to facilitate reconfiguring the host after the ESXi install.

When installing ESXi there a few things to watch for:

• Remember, the ESXi install will reformat the boot disk, so make sure you've migrated any VMs and templates you want to keep off the boot disk before you install.
• Any local disks that the installer identifies as blank (disks without a partition table) will automatically be claimed by ESXi and formatted with VMFS.  If you have any local disks that are blank that you don’t want to have formatted as VMFS disconnect them while you install ESXi. 
• If the host has access to a large number of LUNs it may take several minutes for the installer to complete its storage scan.  You can speed up the installation by disconnecting the host from the SAN while you install ESXi.

Configure the Management Network
After installing ESXi the next step is to logon to the ESXi Direct Console User Interface (DCUI) and set the host’s password and configure the management network.  From the host's console press F2 to access the System Customize screen (shown below).   The first time you log on the root password will be empty so leave it blank when prompted.  Use the DCUI to set the hosts password and configure the management network.



After configuring the management network it’s always a good idea to test network connectivity using the “Test Management Network” option. 

Reconnect the Host in vCenter
Once the root password has been set and the host is connected to the management network the next step is to reconnect the host in vCenter.  Do this by logging onto the vSphere client, right clicking on the host and choosing connect.



When you reconnect the ESXi host you will get a pop-up notifying you that the SSL certificate cannot be verified; this is okay because the host was reinstalled and now has a new SSL certificate. 



Close the SSL error pop-up and provide the ESXi host’s user name and password when prompted, be sure to choose “yes” when asked whether or not to trust the new host certificate.  The host will then be reconnected in vCenter.

Support for Rolling Upgrades
Note that it is supported to have a mix of ESX 3.5, 4.0, 4.1 and ESXi 4.1 hosts in the same cluster.  This support enables you to perform “rolling upgrades”.  A rolling upgrade is when you take one host out of the cluster, migrate it to ESXi, reconnect it to the cluster, and then repeat the procedure for each of the remaining hosts.   One bit of advice when running a mixed cluster, wait until all hosts in the cluster have been migrated to ESXi before provisioning any new VMs or upgrading the VM VMware Tools and hardware versions.  This is a precautionary step done to avoid any potential conflicts that might crop up when running newer versions of VMware Tools and newer hardware versions on older ESX hosts. 

Reconfigure the ESXi Host

With the ESXi host reconnected in vCenter the final step is to reconfigure the newly migrated ESXi hosts.  In my lab this involves setting the NIC teaming properties, adding vSwitches and Port Groups, and reconfiguring NFS datastores.  Depending on your environment this may also include setting up iSCSI initiators and configuring advanced storage settings and multi-pathing policies.  Check your host against the pre-migration settings documented in the Host Configuration Worksheet to ensure everything gets properly reconfigured.    

Using Host Profiles to Reconfigure ESXi Hosts

If you only have a few hosts to migrate then you can probably get buy with manually reconfiguring them.  However, if you have a lot of ESX hosts manually reconfiguring each host individually is not only repetitive but can become time consuming and error prone.  Fortunately, you can automate the host reconfiguration step using vCenter Host Profiles.  Host Profiles are a licensed vCenter feature and you will need to have a valid license to use them, but remember you can leverage the 60-day trial license included with the vCenter 4.1 install/upgrade.  Just be sure to coordinate your ESXi host migrations to take place within the 60-day trial period.

To use Host Profiles you need to start with a fully configured ESXi 4.1 hosts.  This host will be used as a reference host used to create the Host Profile Template.  To create a Host Profile use the vSphere client to perform the following steps:

1. Right click the reference host and choose “Host Profile -> Create Profile from Host…”
2. Enter a name and description for the Host Profile and choose “Next”
3. Verify the name and description and choose “Finish”

(Note that after you create the Host Profile you can modify and further customize it by navigating to "Home" -> "Host Profiles" in the vSphere client.)

Once the Host Profile has been created you can then attach it to each ESXi host after it has been reconnected in vCenter.  Perform the following steps in the vSphere client to attach a Host Profile to a host:

1. Place the host into maintenance mode by right-clicking the newly connected ESXi host and choosing “Enter Maintenance Mode…”
2. Right-click the host and choose “Host Profile -> Manage Profile…”.  In the ensuing pop-up choose the Host Profile to be attached.

After the profile has been attached you then apply the profile.  Applying the profile will apply all the configurartion settings saved in the Host Profile to the host.  For host specific settings, like the IP address for the vMotion networks, you will be prompted to provide the required values.  To apply the host profile:

1. Right-clicking the ESXi 4.1 host and choose “Host Profile -> Manage Profile… -> Apply Profile…”. 
2. In the ensuing pop-up provide any values for host specific settings and choose “Next”. 
3. Once all the required values have been provided click "Finish" to apply the changes to the host.  

 

(Note, in some cases you may need to apply the Host Profile twice as some changes may require  other changes be committed first).

After the Host Profle has been applied take the host out of maintenance mode by right-clicking the host and choosing "Exit Maintenance Mode…".  At this point the host should be fully configured and capable of hosting VMs.  I recommend testing the host by migrating a few less critical VMs first.  Once you are confident the host is working as expected you can then proceed to migrate the next host in the cluster.

Summary

Installing ESXi is pretty straightforward.  You simply boot the host using the installation media and follow the prompts.  Remember the install will overwrite the boot disk, so be sure to migrate any VMs or templates off the boot disk before installing.  It is also important to be aware that any local disks that are blank will automatically get formatted by the ESXi installer.  Also, if the host has access to a lot of LUNs you may want to temporarily disconnect it from the SAN to speed up the install by giving the installer less storage to scan.  After ESXi has been installed logon to the DCUI to set the root user password and configure the management network.  Once the host is back on the management network reconnect it in vCenter and complete the configuration.  If you only have a few hosts to migrate you can manually configure each host.  However, if you have a lot of hosts use Host Profiles to automate the reconfiguration.

Virtualization Admins have a tough job.  Every day they face tough questions like: Is there a performance problem in my virtual infrastructure (VI)? Is it an ESX population issue? Is it a single VM gone haywire? What VMs are being affected? If you’re a VI Admin then you know what I’m talking about when I say these are the questions that start flying when you’re pulled into a large conference room during a service outage and all the finger pointing begins.

vCenter Operations has a lot of great value props going for it - now with the Best of Interop (Overall) and Cloud Computing Category Winner award, I am seeing even more interest in it. So I am starting this ' vCenter Operations Unplugged' series of posts to explain the cool features in the product - hopefully answering the several questions I'm fielding everyday at the same time. In this first post, let's start with the Workload and Health scores and how you can leverage these together to understand the health and wellbeing of your VI.

No one will argue with the fact that vCenter Server is great for gathering virtual infrastructure data/metrics.  Question is, what do they mean?  A bunch of metrics alone does not make identifying and troubleshooting a performance problem very easy.  What vCenter Operations does is take 1,000s of metrics from vCenter Server and bubbles them up into 3 actionable higher level super-metrics or badges for Workload, Health and Capacity.  These are critical pieces of info that would help any VI admin.

Capacity is pretty simple.  How much time do I have left before I run out of a given resource based on my usage trends?  Valuable, but not what I want to focus on today.

Let’s drill down and talk about Workload.  Workload, simply put, is a measurement showing the ratio of the resource demand of a virtual object (VM, ESX, Cluster, etc) versus the amount of resources it can obtain.  The resulting ratio is a score that will help you understand how hard a virtual object is working.  If the Workload score is low (e.g. 20) an object has plenty of resources at its disposal.  The higher the Workload score the closer a virtual object gets to running out of its necessary resources.  A Workload score above 100 (yes, it can be >100) means the virtual object is starving for resources (CPU, Memory, Network I/O or Storage I/O).

Health is a bit unique.  It measures how normal a virtual object is acting based on previous behaviors and grades it on a 0-100 scale.  A Health score of 100 means everything is behaving normally.  A lower Health score indicates the virtual object is acting abnormally (not necessarily unhealthily) and might need your attention.  I’ll go into the details of how Health is calculated in an upcoming blog entry because it is really very interesting, but for now let’s leave it at that.

You can use these two super-metrics together to drive best-practices in your VI.

• High Workload/Low Health – A virtual object is starving for resources and is acting abnormally (e.g., it usually has plenty of resources at its disposal at this time).  This situation requires your immediate attention because services that are normally running smoothly are being affected.
• Normal Workload/Low Health – A virtual object has plenty of resources, but something about it is acting differently than usual (i.e. maybe someone has made a change to the VM configurations).  This may not be a problem, but it definitely requires further investigation within vCenter Operations to determine what actions to take.
• High Workload/High Health – A virtual object is running hot and may be starving for resources, but the Health is high so this is normal behavior for this object during this part of the day (i.e., a scheduled batch job is running, or its morning and all of the users are starting to log in for the day, etc.).  Users may have been complaining about system responses or they may have just gotten use to the speeds provided.  Regardless you should start to think about providing more resources.

Hope that's a helpful first post to kick-off this ' vCenter Operations Unplugged' series. If you want to download a free trial version of vCenter Operations just click here: https://www.vmware.com/tryvmware/?p=vcenter-ops&lp=1. As always, your feedback is most welcome.

I’m constantly being asked how to get the most out of a ThinApp package. Especially how to make the startup faster. There are many things you can do and most of them are application specific. I thought a blogs post providing the tweaks that generally provides the best effect for the lowest amount of time spent would be of interest.

1. Get rid of the %Fonts% folder. We will virtualize any fonts being installed during the Setup Capture process. The problem is that it takes time to activate them on start of the application. Why not delete the fonts from the virtual environment and if the fonts are needed install them locally instead.
2. Disable services. We support virtualizing most services. Many times are a service installed but not really needed to be started immediately by the application so why waste time waiting for it to start? Add AutoStartServices=0 under [BuildOptions] in your package.ini file and rebuild the package. Test if your application still runs and behaves as expected. Most of the times will you find that it does..
3. Pre-compile .NET assemblies. If your application uses .Net is there a big chance you can save some valuable seconds by Pre-compiling .NET assemblies during Setup Capture (before running post installation snapshot). This will make the package larger but first launch quicker. Example on how to do it: C:\WINDOWS\Microsoft.NET\Framework\v2.0.50727\ngen.exe executequeueditems

 

There are many more things you can do but they all include more understanding of the application you packaged and would be more or less specific to that application. Some guidance:

1. Clean out anything not necessary within the project. Why keep log files, installer cache and so on?
2. Run Log Monitor and look for loops. Anything where it seems like the application is searching for something but cannot find it. Sometimes can you save some valuable milliseconds by providing what the application is looking for so it doesn’t have to wait for a timeout to happen.
3. Make sure your Sandbox stays as small as possible. Know what ends up in it and why. Especially watch out for large files being copied into the Sandbox during first launch of the applications.

 

Posted by Steve Herrod
Chief Technology Officer

In April I introduced VMware’s acquisition of SlideRocket with a blog entry entitled, “The New Way to Work – End-User Computing in the Post-PC Era”. Today I am happy to announce the next step in this journey with our acquisition of Socialcast, a powerful “Enterprise Activity Stream Engine” that unites a company’s people, information, and applications in real-time. In this blog, I discuss this social platform and how it helps evolve the way we work.

First, let’s step back and look at today’s approach to enterprise communication. For the last 30 years, personal computing has primarily focused on automating the metaphors of the pre-digitized workplace including the “inbox” and “outbox” tray, manila folders, and printed documents. We’ve largely replaced printed memos, mail carts, and filing cabinets with documents, email, and file shares. These tools have dramatically improved our productivity, but the increasing volume of information can be overwhelming and requires manual prioritization and organizational work to keep up with this data deluge.

While traditional mail- and document-centric interaction will certainly remain critical, there are new approaches to collaboration taking root that better exploit the paradigms of the web. For example, communication is increasingly iterative, with fine-grained interaction replacing letter-like back-and-forth. Furthermore, these activity streams increasingly take place across dispersed groups of informally linked collaborators rather than following the boundaries of a formal organization hierarchy. And in today’s frantic world, the information in these activity streams should only interrupt the right people at the right time… and of course be safely archived and searchable. In summary, there is an opportunity for improved collaboration across a company that can drive new levels of productivity and employee satisfaction.

VMware is dedicated to the delivery of the technologies and infrastructure needed to enable this new way of working. We see this new approach as an indication that our industry has entered the post-PC era, enabled by advances in mobile devices, SaaS, and cloud computing. This disruption was the rationale behind our acquisition of SlideRocket and Zimbra, and the catalyst for the launch of VMware Horizon App Manager.

Over the last 3 years, Socialcast has been growing rapidly and garnering the reputation as a true visionary in the enterprise collaboration space. By focusing on people and their work habits, they have developed a platform deployed by some of the world’s largest companies to facilitate communication and collaboration across the entire enterprise. The Socialcast team has achieved this success by delivering the key elements of next-generation enterprise collaboration… real-time activity streams, a social graph of the entire enterprise, and the ability to participate in contextual- and purpose-oriented groups. These are fairly standard elements in this space, but there are four traits that make Socialcast particularly special:

1. Rich integration capabilities
2. Safe Collaboration wherever you work
3. On- and Off-premise deployment
4. A platform for new collaborative applications

Rich Integration Capabilities

Rather than define enterprise social as yet another tool to use or as a feature rooted in a single application, the Socialcast approach emphasizes the integration of social capabilities across the applications, data, and services that people already use. Socialcast includes an integration capability called Reach to add social elements into existing content sources like SharePoint and wikis. This brings collaboration to the places where people, applications, and data already exist.

Safe Collaboration from Wherever You Work

It’s obvious that we’re all more mobile these days as well, and the Socialcast platform offers the freedom to participate in collaboration from rich clients, mobile devices, email, and most importantly from within a range of native Windows, on-premise or cloud based business applications. All of this while offering the enterprise the compliance and security features that are required to satisfy end-users, IT and legal groups.

On- and Off-Premise Deployment

We’re clearly in a hybrid-cloud world, with IT offering some services from within their own datacenters and some services from the public cloud. Why force a choice? With Socialcast, you have your choice of on- or off-premise deployment, as it is available either as SaaS or as a VMware virtual appliance that can be deployed behind the firewall. Cool! 

A Platform for New Collaborative Applications

And last, but not least is the opportunity to build new enterprise applications upon the core Socialcast platform. It’s still in the early days, but it seems inevitable that enterprises will leverage the employee network and improved collaboration capabilities to change the way they receive feedback, track projects, or do any number of other tasks. For a look at one such application, check out the Socialcast Townhall offering… and stay tuned for other such examples.

Customer Success

Several big customers are enjoying the benefits of Socialcast today. Nokia has deployed Socialcast to alleviate the logjam associated with traditional email communication as well as enable new ways for executive management to communicate and interact with their global workforce. The SAS Institute has deployed Socialcast as the hub through which employees can exchange information as well as using Reach, to add social elements to their SharePoint and wiki installations. Humana has also leveraged the Reach platform to create whole new applications that increase employee engagement by incorporating social gaming elements to reward and recognize employees across their worldwide operations. And we’ve just deployed Socialcast within VMware as well, and are already seeing the signs of a more collaborative, productive, and informed organization.

Examples such as these illustrate the richness of the user experience in the post-PC era. Users can easily tap in to collective knowledge and expertise inside and outside their business, reduce unnecessary meetings and redundant communications, and do all this without being tethered to their desk. VMware is leading the way forward in this era, and the combination of our world class technologies and Socialcast’s focus on social communications and applications will accelerate this transformation of the way people work.

 

In 1975 Pepsi launched the Pepsi Challenge. I know this because my dad worked for Pepsi and we had to drink more than our fair share of the stuff on a daily basis. We were living in the Philippines around this time, which along with a handful of more discerning regions like the Soviet Union, Saudi Arabia, Pakistan, Guatemala and half of Canada-were of the opinion that Pepsi was in fact “the real thing”. Now given the copious quantities of cola I had to drink- I could always tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi, but for me, the concept and the marketing behind the Pepsi Challenge was pure brilliance

And so I was amused when I was talking to John Orbaugh the Director of Technology Services for Tyler Independent School District last week about his desktop virtualization implementation with VMware View. Because he told me that when he went to present his proposal for moving to virtual desktops to his board, that he cooked up his own PC Pepsi challenge and used a thin client running View against a physical PC.

Could users really tell the difference? Which did they prefer? I’ll let John tell you more in his upcoming guest blogs, but needless to say things went well for desktop virtualization and that made all the difference at Tyler ISD.

It’s not always easy to convince people to make a change and make the move away from physical PCs as many of us know first-hand. Yes desktop virtualization is about streamlining management and cutting costs. I have seen schools take help desk tickets and cut them in half. I have seen the time taken to deploy a PC go from 8 hours to 8 minutes. I have even seen schools be able to cut log on times from 14 minutes down to 1 minute on 8 year old machines. But desktop virtualization is also very much about both end user perception and experience. I say perception-because end users need to believe that this change will be good. And they also need to see that this change will be an improvement over what they have today.

I regularly tell customers in the state, local and education space (which is what I focus on) to do an assessment before they deploy virtual desktops. This gives them a better understanding of their desktop environments, their peak workloads and what applications are being used. And this sets them up for success by allowing them to properly size their environments. But what I haven’t typically told customers to do before is an “assessment with their end users”. And what I mean by this-is letting end users get in front of a virtual desktop deployment to assess and understand why this is a good thing.

Earlier this week, however I was invited to speak to the faculty and staff of a college looking to move to desktop virtualization. There were about 20 faculty and staff in the room-and a video feed for those couldn’t make it. There were representatives from the libraries, from the math department, from student services. And they had great questions.

Is this secure? How will I migrate over all of my files? What about my particular math applications? Can I toggle between my base image and my VM? Can I still upload applications? What about compatibility with assistive technologies? What about application licensing? What will this look like for me?

I walked through their questions and I outlined how this new technology would impact and improve their world. I talked about improved access across devices (even very old ones) and locations with an interface that they all knew and had come to love, how teachers could now add applications to their course curriculums on the fly (versus having to wait weeks or until the end of the semester), and how they would get better remote access (without getting bumped off the VPN every 30 minutes). And I talked about how the school could now free up space for additional classes-because labs that were previously run in different rooms could be consolidated down in to one or two rooms. Finally I showed them a demo.

This was one of the first times I have been asked to do this. It was a great experience. And I think a key one in helping these end users understand the perceived benefits. I really think that this school should also follow this up with a PC Pepsi Challenge of its own.

So now I’ll throw the question out to you… Are you engaging your end users to get their buy in before rolling out desktops? Are you up for the PC Pepsi challenge?

More from John Orbaugh on this to follow…. You can now read the first post from Jon Orbaugh here.

Courtney Burry; Sr. Product Marketing Manager-SLED, Enterprise Desktop BU

VMware will be performing a system upgrade to several VMware web applications from Friday, June 3rd, 2011 at 8:00PM Pacific Time until Saturday, June 4th, 2011 at 12:30AM Pacific Time.

If you need to file a support request while the upgrade is in progress, please call VMware Technical Support for assistance. Global toll-free numbers for support can be found at: http://www.vmware.com/support/phone_support.html

These system upgrades are part of our commitment to continued service improvements and will help VMware better serve your needs. We appreciate your patience during this maintenance period.

VMware ESX
Cannot enable EVC in a cluster that has IBM blades (1000545)
Date Published: 5/26/2011
Reinstalling the vpxa or aam agent without losing the host record from the vCenter Server database (1031919)
Date Published: 5/26/2011
Accessing the vSphere Client Help fails when using Google Chrome as the default browser (1037183)
Date Published: 5/24/2011
After running diskpart.exe to extend the disk size in Windows, the partition size does not get updated (1000630)
Date Published: 5/23/2011
Troubleshooting issues when creating or committing snapshots in ESX/ESXi (1038963)
Date Published: 5/24/2011

VMware ESXi
vMotion fails at 82% with the error: General system error occured - Failed to resume (1036044)
Date Published: 5/23/2011
Configuring SNMP on an ESX/ESXi 4.0 or later host fails with the error: Load persistant store failed (1000529)
Date Published: 5/27/2011
Syslog stops when the remote syslog server is not reachable (1000607)
Date Published: 5/24/2011
Special characters in the community string for SNMP traps are not retained (1023998)
Date Published: 5/25/2011
Using Dynamic Voltage and Frequency Scaling (DVFS) for Power Management (1037164)
Date Published: 5/23/2011
When an ESXi host in a cluster enabled with DPM exits the standby mode, HA reports the error: error while running health check script (1037773)
Date Published: 5/27/2011
Reverting to a snapshot in vCenter Server shows the error: This object has already been deleted or has not been completely created. (1039326)
Date Published: 5/25/2011

VMware Fusion
Duplicate printers appear when printing with Bonjour or ThinPrint in VMware Fusion (2000349)
Date Published: 5/27/2011

VMware Service Manager
Out Of Named Licenses error when importing from active directory in VMware Service Manager (1038788)
Date Published: 5/26/2011
Polling service is not restarted correctly in VMware Service Manager 9.0 (1039174)
Date Published: 5/24/2011

VMware vCenter Configuration Manager
Patches do not deploy from the configured remote patch repository (1038870)
Date Published: 5/28/2011
Configuration Manager agents fail to deploy to Windows Vista, 7, 2008, or 2008 R2 (1039112)
Date Published: 5/28/2011
Unable to collect data from ESX or ESXi hosts in vCenter Configuration Manager (2000053)
Date Published: 5/29/2011
vCenter Configuration Manager Remote Client installs but does not initialize properly (1039113)
Date Published: 5/27/2011
vCenter Configuration Manager scheduled jobs fail to properly reschedule after the time is modified (1039114)
Date Published: 5/26/2011

VMware vCenter Server
Configuring HA on ESX hosts fails with the error: Cannot complete the configuration of the HA agent on the host (1030835)
Date Published: 5/26/2011
After upgrading from vCenter Server 4.0 to 4.1, Performance Charts display only the data before the upgrade (1031856)
Date Published: 5/26/2011
Cannot configure HA when there are more than one Management Network/Service Console (1000618)
Date Published: 5/27/2011
vCenter Server takes a long time to start when connected to the Oracle database (1027165)
Date Published: 5/24/2011
vCenter Server fails to display the accurate memory usage. (1037914)
Date Published: 5/26/2011
vCenter Server fails with the error: ASSERT d:/build/ob/bora-258902/bora/vpx/drm/vpxDrmAction.cpp:1247 (1038242)
Date Published: 5/25/2011

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager
Reconfiguration of recovered virtual machines fail with error: InvalidDeviceBacking in Site Recovery Manager (1000149)
Date Published: 5/24/2011
TestFailover and Failover operations in Site Recovery Manager fail with error: RecoveredFilePathNotFound (1036731)
Date Published: 5/25/2011
VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager failover and test failover fail with the error: "Failed to prepare storage" or "Failed to create LUN snapshot" (1039243)
Date Published: 5/26/2011

VMware vCenter Update Manager
Automating patch downloads for VMware Update Manager servers that do not have an Internet connection (1000627)
Date Published: 5/23/2011
Remediating an ESX/ESXi host using VMware Update Manager fails with the error: Cannot download VIB files from patch source (1029782)
Date Published: 5/27/2011

VMware vFabric Hyperic Server
Uploading large files to ftpsite for vFabric/SpringSource support (1037333)
Date Published: 5/24/2011

VMware View Manager
VMware View Agent fails to uninstall (2000017)
Date Published: 5/27/2011
Configuring PCoIP session variables (1014686)
Date Published: 5/25/2011

VMware VirtualCenter
Using an external scheduler or changing the schedule for vCenter Server roll-up jobs (2000109)
Date Published: 5/24/2011

VMware vSphere Client Plug-ins
vSphere 4.1 client loads, but cannot access remote consoles for virtual machines (1037212)
Date Published: 5/24/2011

VMware Workstation
Auto connecting a HID-Bootable device to a virtual machine fails with the error: failed: 17 (2000350)
Date Published: 5/27/2011

By  Matt Sarrel

After playing around more with the Virtacore vCloud Express environment and thought I’d share a few insights that will make it easier to get started. 

The first important security feature that I noticed is the ability to declare multiple roles for administrators and assign privileges regarding the creation, movement, and maintenance of virtual machines.  In the screen shot below, only my initial user, admin, is listed.  In order to create a new user, I click the green New User button.

Users have the ability to administer virtual machines and virtual applications.  The process of adding a user is pretty straightforward – user name, password, contact info.  It’s possible to establish quotas for storage and deployment of virtual machines.  This is useful if multiple admins are bringing VM’s up and down for various projects in order to prevent one of them from grabbing all of the resources you’ve allocated.

If you’d like the new user to have full privileges in managing your Virtacore vCloud environment, then use the Role drop down at the bottom of the screen to select Organizational Administrator.

Now you can share your environment as necessary and have some control over who can do what on a VM level.

One more mind map to round out the week, this one is for VMware Site Recovery Manager issues. SRM for short.

As before, this PDF has a click-able Flash object embedded so that you can drill down into the various topics and articles. We list the steps to take, and link to articles (or documentation) describing the steps in detail. Each main Resolution Path article has more information than we list here however, so we recommend reading the full article if you ever encounter this issue.

Today’s Mind Map details our Resolution Paths for VMware Site Recovery Manager Issues: Click here to open the download page

Note: Some users are complaining about seeing only a blank page when viewing these new mind maps. Make sure to use version 9 or later of Adobe Reader to open these.

The VMware Center for Policy and Compliance is excited to announce our content release of the vSphere 4.1 Security Hardening Guidelines for vCenter Configuration Manager (VCM).

CP&C is a group of folks with alphabet soup behind their names that build content, thought leadership and evangelize our Security & Compliance  strategy all over the planet.

Why should you care about this latest release? That’s easy, the content supports ESX 4.1, ESXi 4.1 and vCenter 4.1. That means we can automate the continuous collection of data, compare it to our standards and within minutes provide prescriptive guidance on best practices and  reduce the LONG painful audit cycle.

Together VCM and Host Profiles become an important  part of creating a trusted virtual environment.  With VCM and the new CP&C content you can harden your ESX/i hosts based on vSphere standards and use Host Profiles to push these secure settings across your virtual infrastructure.  There is no longer a need to painstakingly pour-over the best practices or reference technical documentation in order to configure the Host Profile reference host(s) to meet these standards.

By the way, these standards have been recommended to the PCI Security Council as benchmark for 2.0 content around virtualization. (Stay Tuned!)

Yours Truly, George Gerchow - VMware Director of CP&C.

vSphere 4.1 Security Hardening Guidelines Compliance Dashboard snapshots:

By Matt Sarrel

I recently had the chance to log in and check out the new Virtacore vCloud Express environment.  The interface is easy to navigate and has a familiar feel (especially after the beta).

The Create a New Server button is prominently displayed, a good thing because I need to start creating and packaging servers.  Along the left hand side of the GUI are a bunch of management choices where I can create users and assign privileges to them for managing VM’s, where I can save my VM creation parameters as templates, and where I can manage IP addresses and security features.

Across the top of the page in a tabbed interface I have several choices to set the scope of my management activities.

The Public Cloud tabs for Virginia and California are for shared resources in the Virtacore data centers.  This is probably where most of us will play around.  The new thing is the My Private Cloud tab, which lets you manage a…private cloud hosted at Virtacore’s data centers or at your own data center. 

This is where I think things are going to start to get fun because I could, for example, build multiple cloud environments for different functions or stages of application development. 

I could develop and test in the public cloud, then move my VM’s to my private cloud for a pilot implementation, and then ultimately move my VM in-house to go into production. 

If I had a whole development/test/implementation team, then we could keep new builds moving through the circuit on a continuous basis.

Stay tuned for more quick updates, and be sure to follow Virtacore and vCloud on Twitter. 

Matthew D. Sarrel (or Matt Sarrel) is executive director of  Sarrel Group , a technology product testing, editorial services, and technical marketing consulting company.  He also holds editorial positions at pcmag.com, eweek, GigaOM, and Allbusiness.com, and blogs at  TopTechDog .

By Hugo Strydom, Managing Consultant, VMware Professional Services

In the first part we looked at how we collect network stats. In this part we will be looking at when and how LBT checks for load and the process of moving the VM traffic to another pNIC.

Let's first look at the detection and frequency. The vmkernel checks every 30sec the stats from the relevant pNIC's. The calculation will use the stats for the 30sec interval and get an average over the 30sec (to normalize the average and to eliminate spikes). If the bandwidth is above 75%, it will mark the pNIC as saturated.

It will look at RX and TX individually. Thus if RX is at 99% and TX is at 1% the avg is 50%, the calculation will take into account that the RX is above the 75% and thus also mark the pNIC as saturated.

If a pNIC have been marked as saturated, the vmkernel will not move any more traffic onto the saturated pNIC (except when a VM is powered on at initial placement, see part 1). VM traffic will only be moved off a saturated pNIC unless all pNIC have been marked as saturated (More on this in Part 3).

The process of moving a VM traffic from one pNIC to another is as follows :

1. vmkernel detect pNIC is saturated based on 30sec calculation
2. Calculation takes place to determine which VM's to move to which unsaturated pNIC
3. VM traffic is moved to new pNIC

Note that when the VM traffic is moved there is no halt in traffic or VM world.

In part 3 we look at some scenarios and rules on how LBT will move VM traffic around.

Today we have yet another mind map for OS issues. Those are issues that pertain to the guest operating system you are running in your vm.

As before, this PDF has a click-able Flash object embedded so that you can drill down into the various topics and articles. We list the steps to take, and link to articles (or documentation) describing the steps in detail. Each main Resolution Path article has more information than we list here however, so we recommend reading the full article if you ever encounter this issue.

Today’s Mind Map details our Resolution Paths for OS Issues: Click here to open the download page

Note: Some users are complaining about seeing only a blank page when viewing these new mind maps. Make sure to use version 9 or later of Adobe Reader to open these.

By Karl Robinson, Managing Director at StratoGen

I often get asked what’s so great about cloud hosting with VMware when there are so many different cloud hosting platforms available. The beauty of the cloud is that I can always reply with ‘try it and see’, as it’s so easy to take a free trial on a VMware cloud hosting platform for a few days.

I guess one of the key things about vCloud Powered solutions are that they are single vendor end to end – from the portal to the back end.  Many other cloud offerings have ‘home grown’ integration into the hypervisor, which works fine, but presents ongoing compatibility challenges as the differing technologies evolve.

Behind the scenes you expect VMware to offer superior availability and performance, but how easy is the platform to use in real life? Just how do you deploy a VMware virtual machine in the cloud?

If you’re new to VMware, the first thing to know is that most of the VMware cloud hosting providers will use vCloud Director (vCD) as the user interface. vCloud Director allows them to present you with a virtual datacentre in the cloud, into which you can build and deploy your virtual machines, create networks and even assign firewall rules. Logging in to your virtual datacentre for the first time can be a little daunting – so let’s cut to the chase and walk through the basic steps to get your first virtual machine up and running.

If you would like to try VMware cloud hosting then please click here to take a free trial.

I’m going to assume that you already have a Virtual Datacentre (vDC) allocated to you by your VMware hosting provider. Assuming you do, you should have a unique URL to access your vDC, and a username and password, so first things first; you’ll need to log in:

Once logged in, you’ll be taken to the ‘home’ screen welcoming you to your cloud.  On the home screen, click on the ‘Build new vApp’ link:

A vApp is essentially a logical collection of virtual machines and networks – it is a self-contained entity which can be moved, copied or saved into a catalogue to simplify future provisioning and maintenance.  This functionality is extremely valuable if you regularly deploy the same type of environment.  You can’t deploy any resources in your cloud without first building a vApp.  So once you’ve clicked the link, you’ll be presented with the ‘vApp Wizard’:

The wizard will give your vApp a default name, using the convention ‘vApp_yourusername_#’ - # is a sequential number – each time you build a vApp the number will increment by 1.  So in theory you don’t need to rename your vApps, but you might wish to change the name to something more meaningful, based on the role of the vApp for example – if so, simply over-type the name.

I usually ignore the ‘Runtime Lease’ and ‘Storage Lease’ options – you can set your vApp to expire – for example if you are running a short term project, you can set the ‘lease’ for the duration of the project, and your resources will be automatically erased at the end of the lease.  Most customers choose not to do this – if your project shifts and you forget to change the lease, you could wind up in trouble!

Click next in the wizard to move to the next section where you can add virtual machines to your vApp.  You now have a couple of options – you can either choose to deploy a virtual machine from a ‘catalogue’ or deploy a new virtual machine from scratch.

To keep things simple for this first post we’ll go for the catalogue option, but in the next post of this series I’ll talk you through doing it from scratch.

vCD has 2 levels of catalogue – ‘My organisation’s catalogs’ and ‘Public catalogs’.  If you’re a new user, your Organisation’s catalogue will be empty – in post 2 of this series I’ll show you how to create and populate your own catalogue, but for now I’m going to select the public catalogue option.  The StratoGen public catalogue contains a selection of virtual machine images with various preinstalled operating systems:

I’m going to select one CentOs 5.5 virtual machine template with LAMP (you can select multiple machines at this point with different Operating Systems if you need to), then click on the ‘Add’ button and then ‘Next’.

In the next step of the wizard you can connect your virtual machine to the network.  My vDC currently only has one network available to it – a Direct Internet connection.  This connection will have public static IPs which it will allocate to the machines I provision.  There are many different networking scenarios possible within vCD which I’ll cover in later posts – for now a Direct Internet connection will suffice:

Next you can choose the network settings for your VM – by default it will be set to allocate a static IP address from the network pool – most customers choose to use the default but if you want you can allocate a specific IP from the pool or set the box to DHCP:

You’re almost done deploying your first vApp – click next and then next again (skipping the ’configure networking’ step) which will take you through to the ‘Ready to Complete’ screen:

Check the details and when you are happy click ‘Next’ and you’re done deploying your first vApp!  It will take a little time to create, depending on the number and size of templates you’ve chosen to deploy – you can see the provisioning progress by clicking on the ‘My Cloud’ button and watching the progress bar in the vApps view:

Once the provisioning process has completed, you’ll need to power on your vApp before you can use it – you can do this by clicking the green ‘play’ button:

To access the newly provisioned virtual machine, you can use the VMware console tool by simply clicking on the machine icon which will pop up a browser based console window (an installer will run the first time you do this and you may need to allow popups in your browser):

Before logging on for the first time you’ll need to check the password that has been allocated to the VM by the ‘Guest Customisation’ process.  Click on the VMs view then right click on the machine and select properties:

You’ll find the password in the ‘Guest Customisation’ tab:

That’s it! Your first machine is now live on the cloud, connected to the Internet and you’re ready to go!

The vApp we deployed is a simple one to demonstrate how easy is to use vCD, but a vApp could be as complicated as you like consisting of a multi-tiered architecture with middleware servers, application and database servers of mixed OSes all complete with appropriate networking.

About StratoGen

Karl Robinson is Managing Director of StratoGen, a leading cloud hosting provider with a worldwide client base. You can follow StratoGen on twitter, or read more on the StratoGen blog.

VMware would like to welcome two new team members which you may have interactions with when it comes to PowerCLI:

Tsun-Tsun Ho

Tsun-Tsun works as part of the Cloud Platform Extensibility & Automation PM team, Tsun-Tsun is responsible for our SDK/CLI portfolio around vSphere & vCloud APIs. Her focus will be to deliver our customers and partners higher levels of automation and ease of consumption around VMware's Cloud Platform.

 

Tsun-Tsun loves traveling, hiking and eating and she is starting to falling in love with golf.

 

 

Alan Renouf

Alan works as part of our Technical Marketing team, Alan is responsible for the technical marketing side of PowerCLI. Alan is no stranger to the world of PowerCLI and has been using the product since the early beta days of the VI Toolkit. Alan’s focus will be to ensure that people are fully aware of PowerCLI and the areas where it can save VMware customers time and effort.

Alan loves extreme sports and maintaining his PowerCLI based blog: http://virtu-al.net

 

 

Please join us in welcoming our new team members.

VMware obviously works with a lot of partners. Channel partners drive much of our business, and they range from two guys in a garage to the largest systems integrators, resellers, and OEMs on the planet.

I'm working on a project with VMware's channel partner team to figure out how we can help our partners get up to speed on social media marketing. Given that social media is an extremely broad topic, and that we're talking about everybody from Two Guys, Inc. to IBM, I don't think we can put some pdfs together and call it a completed project.

So as a first start, we're working on gathering goals and requirements within VMware and in our partner community, and also on assembling a set of Social Media Marketing 101 tools. I think there will be both general social media material that will be relevant, as well as some resources tuned specifically for IT consulting and VARs.

To start us off, I asked for recommendations on Twitter today about this, and these are some of what my network on Twitter suggested:

 

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But I don't think the conversation stops here! Put your two cents into the comments: what tools, books, links, blog posts should we be looking at as we try to help our resellers and channel partners better utilize social media to connect with customers and bring people along the journey to the cloud?

Weekly virtualization news, as featured on the  Community Roundtable podcast.

VMware Fusion team in Palo Alto is looking for an intern. If you want to apply, check out the Fusion page on Facebook.

As John has written on the VMTN blog, we have received an overwhelming response to the vExpert call for nominations, so we're a little backed up and our judges will need two more weeks to go through all the applications with the attention they deserve. John will be announcing the newest crop of vExperts on the blog, and on the Community forums.

On Thursday, I was at the VMware Forum in Anaheim, and recorded a bunch of video interviews with attendees and partners. I tweeted from the event, so those of you who follow me got the scoop and some pictures. I'm @VmwareCommunity on Twitter, if you don't follow me yet. 

We will be making a little YouTube video or two out of the footage we shot at this VMware Forum and the others. Keep an eye out for them in our YouTube channel.

The world of virtualization has a few exciting things in store for us over the next week or so.

The VMware Forum season is in full swing, and we have more events taking place in May and Early June in Budapest, Madrid, Atlanta, Chile, Johannesburg, Houston, Kiev, and Dublin.

The web page with details is linked straight from vmware.com – in the box that says “VMware Forum 2011” on the lower left.

We also have two webinars today about When Java EE Is Overkill: Lightweight Application Server Use Cases, and a Spanish-language one on Physical IT Infrastructure Control with vCenter Configuration Manager.

Tomorrow, we you can learn to Enhance Productivity with Collaborative Workspace from VMware and Cisco. Also a Portuguese-language version of the vCenter Configuration Manager webinar.

To find out more and register, head over to webcasts.vmware.com

Two full-day regional VMUG conferences are coming up next month, one in Western Pennsylvania, on the 7 ^thof June, and the other in Vancouver on the 21 ^st.

Additionally, the following VMUGs are meeting over the next seven days: Tasmania, Atlanta, East Germany, Buffalo, and Wellington. You can find more details and registration links for all the VMUG meetings at myvmug.org by clicking on “Events.”

By Hugo Strydom, Managing Consultant, VMware Professional Sercices

In this first part of how LBT works we want to first explain how the stats are derived for the pNIC attached to the vDS (or vSwitch).

The vmkernel maintains tx/rx stats for each of the pNIC's that is attached to a vDS. Stats to the vmkernel is updated as soon as the packet have been send or received by the pNIC. There is no overhead on delivering the packet to the VM during the stats update process to the vmkernel.

When a pNIC is not attached to a vDS, no stats will be collected for that pNIC. Have a look at ESXTOP and note that no stats is shown for pNIC's that is not connected to a vSwitch/vDS. Also the in ESXTOP the pNIC is not shown if not connected to vSwitch/vDS.

ESX Host with 4 pNIC's

Consider a vDS Port Group configured for LBT. When a VM is powered on the vNIC is attached to the DVS's pNIC using "Route based on originating virtual port"(default when LBT is selected). At 30sec's intervals the vmkernel will calculate the load on each pNIC that is attached to the vDS and if needed move the VM traffic over to another pNIC. Thus during VM startup the vNIC could be placed on a pNIC that is considered saturated but will be moved off to other pNIC's that is not saturated once LBT have done a round of calculations to balance the load.

In part 2 we will explain how NLB calculate when to move VM traffic onto another pNic.

For those that don’t really have time to read the entire blog, I can simply answer as, yes, to the above question.  Indeed Java is independent of the underlying hypervisor such as VMware bare metal hypervisor, and the Operating System.  But for those folks that want to delve a little more into what this means, please read on.

This question has recently started to surface from customers new to Virtualization, and not so new to Java.  Now while the answer to the question posed was candidly obvious, it was a legitimate question to address as it seemed to have been asked a few times.

There is no doubt that Java’s main design tenets are based on a cross-platform language that is Operating Systems independent, so long as there is an Operating System supported underlying runtime.  We know this runtime as the Java Virtual Machine (JVM) that has become a permanent fixture of many enterprise application platforms.  You could write a Java application and run it on various JVMs on different Operating Systems, and without needing to recompile.  Now of course many of VMware’s customers have one vendor targeted JVM in production and wouldn’t have to worry about moving a Java application from one JVM implementation to another, but if they chose to they could easily do it, primarily due to Java’s cross-platform and Operating System independence facilitated by a JVM. 

Hence you can conclude that the Java applications don’t really care which JVM is being targeted to run on and hence independent of the specific JVM implementation and Operating System. 

NOTE: Of course some of you may say “what about all of the different internal behaviors of one JVM vs. another?”  At the end of the day they all adhere to the JVM Spec, and while some JVM Options/(-XX) flags etc. are named differently; they more or less behave in a similar manner.  Certainly the differences are not in the language, but in the way the Java process can be optimized with various JVM options passed at the Java command line.)

Fast forward to the infrastructure side of things, VMware ESXi is a bare metal hypervisor that makes it possible to run multiple operating systems on a particular piece of hardware.  It alleviates the infrastructure administrators from having to worry about installing one kind of operating system for one piece of hardware vs. another.  VMware takes care of making the Operating System run independent of the underlying hardware (bare metal) and hence creating a degree of independence between the Operating System and the bare metal/hardware.

While the answer to the question of “Is Java both OS and Hypervisor Independent?” Is clearly yes, it is so due to two degrees of independence, where the first degree being that of Java’s main tenet of cross platform and OS independence, and then second degree is that of VMware ESXi Hypervisor making the Operating System independent of the hardware that it runs on.  In fact when a Java application runs on an Operating System that is in a ESXi based Virtual Machine, ESXi has no notion of knowing it is a Java workload running on the Operating System, making the ESXi hypervisor completely independent of the workload that is running on it – a further testament to this is when you deploy a Java application on a Virtual Machine no Operating System changes are needed due to this independence.

Conversely the JVM doesn’t really know that is running on a Virtual Machine sitting on an ESXi hypervisor, to the JVM the VM appears like any other server, with compute resources (CPUs/RAM etc.) presented to it.

In conclusion so long as the JVM you are using is supported on the Operating System that your applications are running on then there is no need for additional concern and/or dependency for additional support from the downstream virtual machine and ESXi layers.  However, should you feel you would like to get additional support when running Java in Virtual Machine on VMware ESXi, you are welcome to submit a support ticket, and we will be glad to help you.

 

Below diagram illustrates all the layers we discussed in this blog.



 

As previously mentioned many of our customers have successfully deployed various Java application servers on ESXi based virtual machines in production environments.

Drop me a question, otherwise check out the Enterprise Java Applications on VMware Best Practices Guide: here.

Emad Benjamin, Java and vFabric Solutions Architect

Here’s our latest mind map for Lab Manager issues. As before, this PDF has a clickable Flash object embedded so that you can drill down into the various topics and articles. We list the steps to take, and link to articles (or documentation) describing the steps in detail. Each main Resolution Path article has more information than we list here however, so we recommend reading the full article if you ever encounter this issue.

Today’s Mind Map details our Resolution Paths for Lab Manager Issues: Click here to open the download page

 

Note: Some users are complaining about seeing only a blank page when viewing these new mind maps. Make sure to use version 9 or later of Adobe Reader to open these.

Apache Tomcat
Determining your version of Tomcat (1033932)
Date Published: 5/19/2011

VMware Converter
VMware Converter fails with the error: Unable to create a VSS snapshot of the source volume(s) (1039087)
Date Published: 5/20/2011

VMware ESX
Cursor fails to interact with any objects in the bottom 3 inches of the screen of a full screen virtual machine. (1000467)
Date Published: 5/20/2011
Exporting system logs fail for ESX/ESXi host fails with the error: A general system error occurred: internal error (1000558)
Date Published: 5/20/2011
Windows shortcut keys do not work as expected with the vSphere Client on Windows 7 (1039311)
Date Published: 5/16/2011
ESX/ESXi hosts disconnect from vCenter Server with timeout and reservation errors (1038466)
Date Published: 5/18/2011

VMware ESXi
Connecting to the ESXi host using SSH fails with the error: Network error: Connection Refused (1039095)
Date Published: 5/17/2011
Enabling SSH in Virtual Supervisor Module (VSM) of Nexus 1000V (1000103)
Date Published: 5/17/2011
Applying host profile fails with the error: Operation not supported (1017580)
Date Published: 5/16/2011
VMotion fails with Error bad003F (1036834)
Date Published: 5/19/2011
Unable to mount a floppy image in vCenter Server (1036836)
Date Published: 5/20/2011
Oracle 11gR2 prerequisite checker warns of missing packages during installation on SUSE Linux Enterprise Server for VMware (1038854)
Date Published: 5/16/2011
VMware Update Manager/esxupdate error codes (1039063)
Date Published: 5/17/2011
Unable to increase VMFS datastore when the datastore is full (1039239)
Date Published: 5/17/2011
Unable to add a USB device to a virtual machine (1039359)
Date Published: 5/20/2011

VMware Horizon App Manager
Licensing VMware Horizon App Manager (1037504)
Date Published: 5/18/2011
VMware Horizon App Manager FAQs (1038863)
Date Published: 5/18/2011
Minimum system requirements for VMware Horizon App Manager (1038879)
Date Published: 5/18/2011
VMware Horizon App Manager Connector network port requirements (1038880)
Date Published: 5/18/2011
Troubleshooting common issues for VMware Horizon App Manager (1038882)
Date Published: 5/18/2011

VMware Service Manager
Unable to assign a customer approval task to a customers manager on a custom QD field (1000633)
Date Published: 5/21/2011
Knowledge article search returns articles that do not have search words in the body or title. (1037301)
Date Published: 5/21/2011
Upgrading from VMware Service Manager 9.x RP07 to RP08 fails with the error: CheckBackupColumns failed (1038931)
Date Published: 5/18/2011
Task history entries are not listed in call history when request is linked to a call in VMware Service Manager (1039116)
Date Published: 5/21/2011

VMware ThinApp
Running a ThinApped application attempts to install native application (1039126)
Date Published: 5/17/2011

VMware vCenter Lab Manager
Accessing the virtual machine console using Lab Manager fails with the error: VMware Remote MKS ActiveX control not running (1019535)
Date Published: 5/20/2011

VMware vCenter Server
vCenter Server 4.1 Agent Pre-upgrade checker fails with the error: Agentupgradechecker has stopped working (1035121)
Date Published: 5/19/2011
Searching for a virtual machine using the vCenter Server search option fails with error: Login to the query service failed. The remote name could not be resolved (1036541)
Date Published: 5/19/2011
Accessing the Storage View tab in vCenter Server fails with the error: An internal error was encountered while initializing the storage service (1038597)
Date Published: 5/18/2011
VMware VirtualCenter Server service fails with error: protocol adapter not loadable (1038804)
Date Published: 5/17/2011
Querying the virtual machine details using the vCenter Server search option fails with the error: Login to the query service failed (1039180)
Date Published: 5/16/2011
vSphere Client reports the error: VirtualInfrastructure.Utils.PropertyOps.ImmediatePropertyValueByServerGivenName(Object, String) (1039305)
Date Published: 5/16/2011
Accessing the vCenter Server Licensing Reporting Manager fails with the error: Authentication required (1039364)
Date Published: 5/16/2011
Moving the vCenter Server virtual machine to new a ESX/ESXi host without EVC enabled (1000301)
Date Published: 5/20/2011
Unable to input the time in the scheduled task wizard (1013261)
Date Published: 5/17/2011
Manually downloading VMware Update Manager patches (1018475)
Date Published: 5/19/2011
Using Remote Desktop Connections causes vSphere Client to fail on subsequent logins (1031850)
Date Published: 5/17/2011
Installing vCenter Update Manager fails with the error: Error 25085 Setup failed to register VMware vCenter Update Manager extension (1036055)
Date Published: 5/20/2011
Starting the VMware VirtualCenter Service service fails with the error: Windows could not start the VMware VirtualCenter Server on Local Computer (1038138)
Date Published: 5/17/2011
vCenter maximum number of Virtual Ports exceeded in vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS) (1038193)
Date Published: 5/17/2011
Migrating a virtual machine fails when entering the maintenance mode with the error: Tools installation in progress (1038542)
Date Published: 5/18/2011
vCenter Server alarms for HA do not trigger (1038695)
Date Published: 5/18/2011
Post installation issues with vCenter Server 4.1 (1000153)
Date Published: 5/20/2011

VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat
Heartbeat installation fails with the error: parsing change log an exception occurred (1032743)
Date Published: 5/19/2011

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager
Creating a Protection Group on a SRM recovery site fails with the error: Operation Timed Out (1000220)
Date Published: 5/17/2011
Entering a vCenter Site Recovery Manager license key in the vCenter Server fails with the error: license error 5 diagnostic message license file not found (1000609)
Date Published: 5/20/2011
Cannot enter the license key for vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4.x on vCenter Server 4.0 GA (1000613)
Date Published: 5/20/2011
Storage Replication Adapter does not return any replicated devices/LUNs (1038398)
Date Published: 5/19/2011
DNS customization fails in VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (1039185)
Date Published: 5/18/2011
Guest IP customization fails in VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (1039187)
Date Published: 5/16/2011
Configuring protection for a virtual machine in VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager fails with the error: Permission to perform this operation was denied (1039233)
Date Published: 5/17/2011
Cannot license VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4.x (2000031)
Date Published: 5/20/2011

VMware vCenter Update Manager
Cannot enable the Update Manager Plug-in after changing the database user password in vCenter Update Manager 4.1 Update 1 (1039089)
Date Published: 5/17/2011
Installing VMware Update Manager fails with the error: The vCenter server entered is not reachable (1039226)
Date Published: 5/16/2011

VMware vCloud Connector
Purging unwanted staging files on a vCloud Connector server in order to prevent depleted disk space (1038803)
Date Published: 5/16/2011

VMware vFabric Enterprise Ready Server
Configuring the MPM used in an HTTPD instance of vFabric Enterprise Ready Server (1036658)
Date Published: 5/21/2011

VMware View Manager
When using Wyse R50L Thin clients to connect to virtual desktops, the desktops go to an Agent Unreachable state after a network disconnect (1038156)
Date Published: 5/19/2011
Creating a View desktop pool fails with the error: errorcode=3,000 (1039150)
Date Published: 5/17/2011
Accessing the Administrators folder in View Administrator fails with the error: Fail to fetch admin. (1039307)
Date Published: 5/17/2011
View Desktop becomes unresponsive when playing video over the WAN if MMR is enabled (1039173)
Date Published: 5/16/2011
Smart cards might not work correctly in View desktops using PCoIP if Windows Updates is disabled (1039184)
Date Published: 5/16/2011

VMware VirtualCenter
Deploying the Windows 2000 virtual machine fails at 93-95% with the error: Cannot complete Customization (1013683)
Date Published: 5/16/2011
Virtual machine CPU usage alarm triggers frequent emails even when the frequency of the alarm definition is set to 5 minutes (1022292)
Date Published: 5/20/2011

Everyday we hear about Virtual Desktops making a positive impact.  Perhaps no where is this more true than in healthcare, where the need for always-on access and ease-of-use intersects with the requirements associated with securing personal medical records.

Together with Imprivata we are helping clinicians become better more efficient caregivers.  Our joint solutions help enable the clinical desktop to become a better assistant in patient care by removing some of the “context switching” associated with a clinicians day-to-day tasks.  In so doing, we enable caregivers to do what they do best.  Take care of Patients.

The following is the first of a three part series of post by David Ting, Founder and CTO, Imprivata. We hope you find it interesting and informative.

Frank Nydam
Director Healthcare Solutions & Market Development, VMware

Four Tips for Increasing Clinician Electronic Medical Record Adoption With Virtual Desktops
Guest Blog Post (Part 1 of a 3 part series)
By David Ting, Founder and CTO, Imprivata

It’s important for hospitals to carefully guard the productivity and workflow of clinicians – and particularly physicians – when pushing new technologies like electronic medical records (EMR).

A successful EMR implementation takes more than technology – it requires groundwork to gain clinician acceptance:

• Studying the clinician workflow before deploying the EMR solution to best match deployment specifics to workflow needs.
• Deploying the solution in phases and finding advocates in each group – particularly physician advocates.
• Where possible, using physicians to train physicians on new technologies.

However, you can use technology to 'sweeten' the EMR deployment.  Because EMR adoption adds new tasks to the clinician's current workflow, it's important to eliminate other tasks that are often tedious and time-consuming. 

This is where Imprivata and VMware View enter the picture. Imprivata has integrated its access management solution with VMware View, adding single sign-on (SSO), authentication management, and user roaming/location awareness for the virtual desktop session as well as the applications it contains.  

What's the benefit for hospitals? Rolling out EMR solutions with a roaming virtual desktop eliminates barriers to EMR adoption and gives clinicians their own adoption incentives of easier login and streamlined access to data. Here are a few tips to increase clinician EMR adoption: 

Tip 1: Eliminate password problems.Implementing SSO for the virtual desktop and all of its applications delivers a quick, highly visible win.  Clinicians can stop remembering all of their different logins, and no longer have to log in to each application.

Tip 2: Provide No Click Access™ to applications.  Give clinicians No Click Access when moving between locations with their virtual desktop. For example, physicians can touch a finger to a biometric reader, or touch a badge to a reader and the workstation retrieves their personal virtual desktop. The same technology works for signing medication orders or e-prescriptions – a single touch is all it takes.  

Tip 3: Provide One-Touch Desktop Roaming:  To really streamline workflow, give roaming clinicians a virtual desktop that follows them throughout the day. For example, open a patient record in the patient room and make some notes. Then move to the office, touch the keypad to retrieve the desktop with the open patient record, and complete the entry in the quieter office environment.  Imprivata OneSign can add location intelligence to switch default printers or other devices depending on the clinician's actual location.

Tip 4: Let them use iPads.  Physicians are not immune to gadget envy. With VMware View, physicians can access the virtual desktop using an iPad, making the EMR application even more accessible and attractive to use. Imprivata OneSign takes care of managing authentication, with integrated audit and compliance reporting.  

Improving clinician productivity and satisfaction is not just 'nice-to-have' – it's essential in today's complex healthcare environment, where technology is disrupting traditional methods of patient care. The secure, roaming virtual desktop from VMware and Imprivata streamlines access to patient records and makes new technologies more accessible for time-pressed clinicians.

Bio: Named one of Infoworld's Top 25 CTOs of 2006, David Ting, Founder and CTO,  Imprivata has more than 20 years of experience in developing advanced imaging software and systems for high security, high-availability systems. David has been involved in a number of start-up ventures including Lexidata, Inc., and Delphax Systems, now a division of Xerox. He holds eight patents and has several patents pending.

Another acquisition was announced this week, VMware has picked up the company Shavlik and plans to continue to utilize their technology in the SMB space. 

An even bigger announcement was the official product launch of VMware Horizon App Manager!  I have been waiting for this guy to be released to the public because it will be a game changer as corporations continue to struggle with managing SaaS based applications in the enterprise.  Horizon App Manager will allow corporations to integrate their existing AD credentials into a single sign on service that will not only integrate with SaaS apps, but also enable provisioning and (more importantly) de-provisioning of SaaS based applications.  Very cool stuff!

Vaughn Stewart - New vSphere 4.1 Report: Measuring SAN & NAS Performance - NetApp and VMware performance engineering have completed a new storage performance technical report, TR-3916. This new report provides the relative I/O performance available from SAN and NAS storage protocols with vSphere 4.1 and a NetApp FAS array.

Andre Leibovici - PCoIP Recommended Practices for Networking Devices - Display protocols for VDI are still very much a subject to be discussed, and in most environments tuned. The out-of-the-box setting from ANY of vendor will work for many situations; however every environment presents different challenges, making optimization a must.

Gabrie van Zanten - Migrating distributed vSwitch to new vCenter - Customer called me to ask how they could easily migrate their existing vCenter to a new vCenter including all distributed vSwitches. They were moving from vCenter 4.0 to vCenter 4.1 and at the same time creating an AD intergrated vCenter and moving from physical to a virtual vCenter. The upgrade path would be a difficult road and they decided to just perform a fresh vCenter install.

David Davis - VIDEO: VMware App Manager Announced in Interview by Scoble (aka Proejct Horizon) - Today, VMware’s Project Horizon has officially been renamed to VMware App Manager and it has been released! All of this was made public on VMware’s website in their App Manager press release and in this excellent interview by Robert Scoble of Building43.com. In the interview, Scoble interviews VMware’s Noah Wasmer, Director of Product Management and Advanced Development.

Andy Grant - vMA + Splunk = Syslog Awesomeness - Managing syslog messages in nearly any size of environment can be daunting.  Aside from the effort configuring every client to send syslog messages to your target server, searching for relevant data can be just as challenging.  There are many articles online on how to use VMware’s vSphere Management Assistant for collecting your ESX/i host syslog messages and naturally, after reading such an article the first thing I did was to jump into my lab and setup vilogger.

Posted by Brian Gammage
Chief Market Technologist, VMware End-User Computing

End-user computing is undergoing its biggest transition since the wave of standardization that accompanied PC market proliferation in the mid 1990s. Most workers still depend on traditional PC applications, but these can now be made available in multiple ways and the new capabilities they use are increasingly delivered from the cloud. Devices are changing too, fragmenting into a much broader range of choice that mirrors the diversity of the individuals in our workplaces. For organizations trying to equip their workers for today and the years ahead, all of this change creates a fast moving target with many new risks and opportunities. As they navigate the complex choices now facing them, IT departments often find themselves trapped between a rock and a hard place of raised expectations: the organization’s leaders want more agility and efficiency, the users just want more liberty and function – and everyone wants it now!

Such periods of change bring out the best in us and we are already seeing this in many organizations across the globe, but even those on the cutting edge face a couple of key challenges. First, people have to keep working efficiently and securely without disruption – existing performance and responsibilities must be maintained. Second, there is invariably no extra money available to fund major IT projects. So any change needs to be incremental: organizations must evolve their end user computing environments – making a managed transition from the age of the PC to this new era of diversity, productivity and collaboration.

All of this is why I joined VMware – after years of advising and supporting organizations with the end user computing journey, I felt it was time to play a more active role. And what a time I chose to make the move, arriving just as we prepared to launch VMware Horizon App Manager, the first phase of Project Horizon. I’ve been following VMware’s End-User Computing (EUC) offerings for many years now and this really is very different.

VMware Horizon is an extensible platform, designed to support that EUC journey. In this it differs from the products we have traditionally offered: rather than being optimized for a specific requirement or value, it’s designed to support and enable the incremental changes that organizations need to make in their EUC environments. With this initial release, Horizon App Manager allows enterprises to extend their desktop management policies and security standards to a catalog of cloud applications that they control, through a single sign-on credential – it makes those cloud applications “enterprise ready” with minimal effort and at low cost.

As we extend the capabilities of VMware Horizon (which we will do, frequently), each additional capability will be equally straightforward to embrace, giving organizations more control over what they change and how. This is what organizations need to make that managed transition – the ability to make their own journeys in a sequence of small steps, made as and when they want, instead of through major, “big bang” projects that strain resources and bring maximum disruption. Just two weeks ago, I joined a company with products that showed the promise of the new era of end user computing; now I’m working for one that’s helping organizations reach that new era. Exciting!

 

A couple of weeks ago we published a free elearning course dedicated to ESXi , “Transition to ESXi Essentials”. The course is a self-paced three-hour onlinetraining and to make it even more appealing we decided to bundle it with a FREE, online, ebook copy of “VMware ESXi: Planning, Implementation, and Security” authored by Dave Mishchenko. The interest was overwhelming and after a week we were fully sold out on the ebooks. I just found out that because of the ongoing interest a new batch of ebooks has been bought. If you haven't taken the course yet make sure you do it now. Not only is this course essential to prepare for your transition to ESXi it will also provide you with a very valuable tool, Dave's ESXi ebook!

Transition to ESXi Essentials... Now!

Just a quick note on the vExpert Program Notifications. Originally I had given us two weeks to go through all 1000-odd nominations and applications. This was too aggressive given travel and other commitments. I'm resetting the clock on this for another two weeks to make sure we don't leave anybody out. Sorry for any inconvenience or upset stomachs. Again, I'm completely blown away and humbled by your efforts and accomplishments. Leaving the specifics of VMware's situation aside, I can't think of another industry where people are so eager to teach and help each other out than our own IT industry. I know we talk a lot about "journeys" and New Ways To Work and 10-year paradigm shifts in how IT departments will be run; but given what I'm reading in these vExpert applications, I am very optimistic that we will all get wherever we're going just fine.

So that you don't walk away empty handed this weekend, I'd like to leave you with a few words of wisdom from the Most Interesting Man in the World.

Stay virtual, my friends.

 

Pearsons and VMware are joining forces. They have announced VMware Press and three upcoming book for the fall 2011 including one covering vCenter Orchestrator named "Automating Day-to-Day Administration of VMware vSphere 5.x".

 

Quoting the summary:

This hands-on technical guide to automating vSphere with Orchestrator teaches administrators how to save time and resources by automating their virtual infrastructure. Automation expert Cody Bunch teaches valuable practices and tool use through a combination of real world automation examples and case studies.

Cody Bunch is looking for feedback on specific use cases or workflows you would like to be covered in this book.

VMware will be performing a system upgrade to several VMware web applications on Saturday, May 21st, 2011 from 9:00PM to 10:00PM Pacific Time.

If you need to file a support request while the upgrade is in progress, call VMware Technical Support for assistance. Global toll-free numbers for support can be found at: http://www.vmware.com/support/phone_support.html

These system upgrades are part of our commitment to continued service improvements and will help VMware better serve your needs. We appreciate your patience during this maintenance period.

At VMware, our engineers work on lots of pet projects in their spare time, and are always looking to get feedback on their projects, recently we started a new area of the VMware Labs site to allow them to share these with you.  We call these flings !

Why flings?

A fling is a short-term thing, not a serious relationship but a fun one. Likewise, the tools that are offered in the flings area are intended to be played with and explored. None of them are guaranteed to become part of any future product offering and there is no support for them. They are, however, totally free for you to download and play around with them!

InventorySnapshot

A recent fling which has just been released by the above two engineers is called InventorySnapshot, this fling allows a user to "snapshot" a given vCenter inventory configuration and then reproduce it. The "inventory" includes the Datacenter folders, datacenters, clusters, resource pools, vApps, hierarchy, roles and permissions, configuration settings, and custom fields. In other words, if you have an inventory with a given set of hosts and VMs organized into a group of clusters, we can faithfully reproduce this environment, including the cluster settings and custom roles you may have defined.

As a simple example, suppose you have an inventory with one datacenter (DC A), one cluster (Cluster A), and two hosts (Host A and Host B). At a high level, the fling emits a PowerCLI script that, when executed, does the following:

1. Creates Datacenter “DC A.”
2. Creates cluster “Cluster A.”
3. Adds host “Host A” to “Cluster A.”
4. Adds host “Host B” to “Cluster A.”

Notice that this can be helpful for a variety of reasons. For example, suppose you’ve spent a lot of time creating a development vCenter environment, and now you wish to deploy it in production. Using this fling, you can snapshot your “dev” environment and then run it against the “production” vCenter server, saving you the task of laboriously adding each host, creating the proper clusters and resource pools, etc.

Watch the following video to learn more about the power of this fling or head over to the InventorySnapshot page for more information.

Weekly virtualization news, as featured on the  Community Roundtable podcast.

Yesterday, we launched VMware Horizon App Manager™, a user-centric management service for accessing cloud applications. It is the first component of our “Project Horizon” that was previewed at VMworld last year. Future releases of VMware Horizon will broker user access to a variety of application types, virtual Windows desktops and data resources.

You can learn more at vmware.com/go/horizonappmanager

Once you have established an account, you can download the connector at vmware.com/go/horizon-manager-download

For questions or purchase info you can contact the right folks at  vmware.com/go/horizon-customer-contact

Last week, VMware vCenter Operations Standard 1.0 won the Best of Interop award in the Cloud Computing & Virtualization category; and VMware View Client For iPad took the Wireless & Mobility category.

VMware is at the SAP Sapphire Now conference today, and we're having a drawing for a BlueLounge Refresh charging station in the 4pm session about Virtualizing SAP in Production. This is a real customer story with Paula Neil, IT System Manager at Mazda.

Today is also the last day to vote on VMworld sessions. We have dozens of sessions for you to vote on at vmworld.com

Last week, we opened community moderator elections on VMTN forums. We elect moderators twice a year for 6-months terms. The voting will continue through the end of the month. If you want to nominate someone, or yourself, the details are posted on VMTN blog at blogs.vmware.com/vmtn

Looking forward, the world of virtualization will continue to excite and thrill us over the next days and weeks.

Tonight, I am flying out to Anaheim, to cover the VMWare Forum held there at the Hyatt Orange County tomorrow. We will be making some videos on the show floor and I will live-tweet from sessions. You can follow my adventures on Twitter @VmwareCommunity.

If you can't make it to Anaheim in person, you can join tomorrow's Forum event online as well.

More VMware Forum events are taking place this month in Edinburgh, Milan, Manchester, Zürich, Mexico City, Moscow, and Budapest.

The VMware Forums web page with details is linked straight from vmware.com – in the box that says “VMware Forum 2011” on the lower left.

We also have a webinar today on Virtualizing Microsoft and Oracle on VMware vSphere: Benefits and Best Practices. Next week, on the 24 ^thof May, we offer the Series Part 2 on VMware vCloud Director QuickStart: Architecting Your Cloud.

The following day, you can learn When Java EE Is Overkill: Lightweight Application Server Use Cases.

Also on the 25 ^th, we got a Spanish-language webinar on controlling physical and virtual infrastructure with help of vCenter Configuration Manager.

To find out more and register, head over to webcasts.vmware.com

There are a number of full-day regional VMUG conferences happening over the next couple of weeks, starting with Palo Alto, in Silicon Valley, today, Farmington, Connecticut, tomorrow, and finally Western Pennsylvania, on the 7 ^thof June.

Additionally, the following VMUGs are meeting over the next seven days: Warsaw, Hamburg, Las Vegas, Minneapolis, Maryland, Toledo, Little Rock, and two Tasmanian VMUGs in Hobart and Launceston. You can find more details and registration links for all the VMUG meetings at myvmug.org by clicking on “Events.”

In my last post I mentioned the requirement to upgrade vCenter in preparation for migrating  to ESXi.  In this post I will discuss the storage considerations related to an ESXi migration.

Before you shutdown an ESX hosts in preparation to migrate it to ESXi you need to evacuate the VMs off the host.  The steps to do this vary depending on where the VMs are stored and what their availability requirements are.  There are three places where VMs can be stored:  (1) on the boot disk, (2) on local disks, or (3) on shared storage.  Let’s discuss the considerations for each.

VMs on Boot Disk Datastores
Every ESX host has at least one VMFS partitions on its boot disk.  Before you migrate a host to ESXi it is important to identify any VMs or templates stored on this datastore.  The ESXi install will re-partition the boot disk and in the process any VMs or templates not relocated will be lost.  As such prior to shutting the host down you need to either move these VMs and templates to another datastore (preferably a shared datastore) or back them up so they can be restored after the migration.   As backup and restore is pretty self explanatory I’m only going to cover the steps to relocate the files to a new datastore.  There are a couple different ways to do this:

Moving Active VMs off the boot disk datastore(s)
If you want to avoid VM downtime the best way to move VMs off the boot disk is by using Storage vMotion.  Storage vMotion allows you to migrate the VM’s disk files to a different datastore while the VM is running.  Assuming you move the files to a shared datastore you can then use vMotion to migrate the running VM to another host and keep it running during the ESXi migration.   Note that both vMotion and Storage vMotion are licensed vCenter features.  Fortunately, if your vSphere license doesn’t include these features you can use the 60-day trial license provided with vCenter 4.1.

Moving inactive VMs off the boot disk datastore(s)
If it’s okay to power off the VM another option is to do a cold migration.  With a cold migration you first shut the VM down and then copy its disk files to a different datastore.  Once the files have been copied, and again assuming you copied them to a shared datastore, you can then register the VM on a separate host and power it on.   There is no special licensing required to perform a cold VM migration.

A note about templates
Templates are VM that have been converted into a template in order to facilitate deploying new VMs.  To move templates you first need to convert the template back to a regular VM, then migrate the files (using either Storage vMotion or Cold Migration), and then convert it back to a template. 

Figure 1 - VM Migration Options

VMs on Local Disk Datastores
Unlike with VMs on the boot disk you have a choice on whether or not to move VMs and templates off any local datastores.   During the ESXi installation local disks with existing datastores are ignored and will not be reformatted.  However, you do need to consider the impact the host downtime will have on your VMs as the VMs and templates on local datastores will not be accessible while the host is being migrated.  If you want to keep the VMs running or ensure templates remain accessible while you migrate the host, you will need to move them off the host’s local datastores.  Again, you can use a combination of Storage vMotion and vMotion to do this, or if downtime is not an issue use cold migration.  

One important thing to be aware of if you choose to leave VMs on local datastores is that you will need to manually re-register them following the ESXi migration.  When ESXi is installed the host level registrations for the local VMs will be lost and the VMs will appear in vCenter as “ghosted”.  To clean this up you will need to remove the ghosted entries from inside vCenter and manually re-register each VM by browsing into the VM’s directory on the local datastore and right clicking on the VMX file to add it back to the host’s inventory.

VMs on Shared Storage Datastores
VMs on shared datastores are the easiest to manage because they don’t require any special handling.  The only consideration necessary in the case of VMs on shared datastores is if the VM is active on the host to be migrated you will need to shut it down or vMotion it to another host.

Summary
During the ESXi migration, when you install ESXi, the boot disk will be re-formatted to include destroying any VMs and templates on it.  As such it’s important that prior to migrating to ESXi you move the VMs and templates off the boot disk, preferably to a shared datastore.  Evacuating the VMs and templates can be done with no VM downtime using a combination of Storage vMotion and vMotion.  If downtime is not a concern you can also use cold migration. 

In addition to evacuating VMs and templates off the boot disk, you also need to give consideration to VMs and templates stored on local datastores.  The ESXi migration requires shutting the host down, which will require powering off any VMs running on local datastores.  While the host is powered down the VMs and templates will not be accessible until after the ESXi migration is complete.  To ensure VMs and templates  remain running and accessible during the ESXi migration it is recommended that they also be migrated to a shared datastore. 

VMs on shared storage are already readily accessible by multiple hosts and therefore don’t require any special consideration.  VMs on shared storage can simply be vMotioned to another host and remain running and accessible during the ESXi migration.

Rob Randell here with a quick note to point folks at a nice blog post from Sourcefire PM Richard Park.  He does an excellent job here outlining what it takes to integrate to vShield through the vShield REST API.  In this post he focus' on "...how to use the API to programatically make firewall rule changes."  He points also points out a few other things you can do with the API like:

• List the current firewall ruleset
• Add new rules
• Get a list of past firewall revisions
• Revert back to a previous ruleset revision

These capabilities are just the tip of the iceberg.  This REST APIs is key to the vShield product line because it allows for our partners to integrate their products very easily and customers to automate the security policy enforcement within their vSphere implementations. 

For more information on the API here is a quick link to the vShield API Programming Guide.  We'll revisit the APIs in much greater detail in a future post.

Thanks for all the congratulations and kind words around today's Horizon App Manager launch -- we're excited as well! Here are three videos that will give you an insight into the functionality, benefits, ease of use, as well as the broader implications of VMware Horizon.

VMware Horizon App Manager Overview

VMware's Noah Wasmer gives a brief overview of Horizon App Manager, how it can extend access to cloud-based applications to users in your enterprise, and how easy it is to set up. Watch the video on YouTube.

 

Box.net and VMware discuss Cloud and SaaS services in the enterprise

Aaron Levie, CEO of Box.net, discusses Horizon App Manager with Noah, and how it can use open standards to change the game how companies use cloud-based applications like Box.net. Watch the video on YouTube.

 

Discussing Horizon and VMware's end user computing strategy with Robert Scoble

Noah also sat down with Robert Scoble to discuss Horizon App Manager and how VMware is helping define the new way to work in the enterprise. See the post at Building 43.

A few days ago we announced the GA of Active Directory Plug-in for VCO. Now we want to show you an example how this plugin can be used.

Suppose you are an Active Directory administrator and you have to create a lot of new accounts for a newly created department of your company with a lot of employees. If just using the UI that your Windows 2008 server has for working with AD objects, you have to do a lot of annoying and repeating steps, but you have the VCO and the AD plug-in on your side :)

Let’s see how to do this job with the help of Active Directory Plug-in 1.0.0 for VCO 4.1

As the configuration of the AD plugin is not a topic of this blog post I'll skip it.

So... What is the criteria that we will observe to see if our exemplary Workflow has finished successfully?

1. We will expect that after a successful run of our custom Workflow there will be a new object for the department - object of type Organizational Unit
2. We will expect to have a User Group object that all newly crated User Accounts belong to, thus making it easy for the admins to grant permissions to all the users in this group
3. We will expect to have one or more exemplary User Account created

Now when we have the goal and the criteria lets see how we can achieve it with custom Workflow that uses the Basic Building Blocks of the Active Directory Plug-in 1.0.0 for VCO 4.1

Here is an example of steps that our Workflow should repeat in order to fulfill the above requirements:

Step 1- Creation of Organizational Unit entity

• Check if there is an Organizational Unit entity already created for the new department of your organization
• If not it will be crated

Step 2– Creation of User Group and associating it with newly created OU

• Check If the User Group already exist and use it
• If there is no such User Group then we should create it

Step 3 - Creation of user and associating it with newly created OU

• New user account is created
• Newly created user account is associated with the Organizational Unit created on Step 1

Step 4 - Add the user to the User Group

The following screenshot shows a possible implementation of the above steps

Lets now start this example and see what will be the result

First lets check how does the inventory tree look like before the run

Now it is time to start the Workflow and observe it during run-time

Filling the Input Parameters...

Workflow during run time...

...And the successful Finish :) ...

 

Now it is the time to look at the results...

This is it...

There is an Organizational Unit called "Workflow Development" with two objects inside. One of it is the User Account "johnsmith" and the other one is the User Group "Workflow Developers"

... so we can conclude that we meet our success criteria :)

You can check the official product site  and the user guide for more info. 

Following the release of the Microsoft Active Directory plug-in VMware demonstrates how to combine building block workflows into a custom one.

Today marks a major milestone for VMware’s End-User Computing vision with the launch of VMware Horizon App Manager, a user-centric management service for accessing cloud applications.  We are excited to bring this new service to our customers.

Over the last few years, the “tectonic plates” of IT have been shifting. In increasing numbers, organizations are moving to embrace the cloud in new, unexpected ways.  As our customers push for new workforce efficacies they are adopting a new generation of applications like WebEx, salesforce.com, Google Apps, BroadVision and/or Box.net.  Organizations are seeing value and productivity gains by having applications and data available anywhere, across different devices - and the devices are changing just as fast. 

While Windows is likely to be the dominate Operating System in enterprises for years to come, it is clear that new devices are carving their niche in the workplace.  iPads, Android tablets and phones, and many other non-Windows based devices are fast becoming an equal rival to the PC for collaboration and communication.

Enterprise IT pros, who once were able to say “that device is not supported,” are facing an empowered workforce that wants to know why they can’t have the same on-demand access to their work apps that they have with their personal apps.  The phrase “consumerization of IT” is taking hold, and while many are quick to suggest this isn’t happening in many IT shops, we have talked to and surveyed growing numbers of customers that are further along in this process than anyone could have anticipated.

Through the process of launching Horizon App manager, I have heard from some customers that they now have a cloud first policy – where they look to cloud applications first, and if they can’t find one, only then do they look for something that needs to be installed.  In fact, we talked to a Fortune 100 company that stated that they don’t just have 10 or 20 SaaS applications, they have hundreds already in use by their workforce.

At VMware, we believe this trend is just beginning.

VMware Horizon App Manager provides the foundation customers need to embrace a new way to work on their terms.  At its core, VMware Horizon App Manager includes an identity-as-a-service hub that securely extends a user’s existing identity in systems such as Microsoft Active Directory or other directory options, into third-party public cloud applications like Box.net, BroadVision, Google, salesforce.com, WebEx and Workday. This dramatically simplifies the management of multiple access credentials, a necessity brought about by the growing number of cloud applications now found in a typical enterprise. Simplification benefits both IT and users by collapsing separate identity silos into a single enterprise identity that secures user access across private and public clouds. In addition, the VMware Horizon App Manager provides an open, user-centric platform for accessing cloud applications within a single portal that is accessible from a wide range of end-user devices.

Over time, Horizon will leverage this foundation of enterprise security and policy to help customers manage other services including virtualized Windows Applications, published applications, data services, and some of our own next generation applications like Sliderocket, Zimbra, and Mozy. 

Behind the scenes…

I wanted to put a quick word in this blog about VMware as a company.  It is rare that a company the size of VMware would encourage “what if” ideas to be not only considered, but also funded, and delivered.

Nearly two years ago, armed with a presentation, a business plan, and a bit of passion – A small team of us presented what was then called “Project Origami” to the R&D leadership team.  From there, the vision for what is now Horizon App Manager started to grow.    

Today, I couldn’t be more proud of the product, and the team that enabled this vision to come to reality. We look forward to working hard, learning with you, and building the best solutions possible to help you, our customers, embrace a new way to work.

Noah Wasmer
Director, Advanced Development, End-User Computing, VMware
May 17, 2011

 

VMware ACE
Applying a policy update package in ACE fails with the error: Setup has detected that this ACE package requires a newer version of VMware Workstation (1038992)
Date Published: 5/9/2011

VMware Converter
Converting a physical or virtual machine with VMware Converter takes longer than expected (1038454)
Date Published: 5/12/2011
Starting a virtual machine that was converted using VMware Converter fails with the error: STOP 0x79 MISMATCHED_HAL (1038576)
Date Published: 5/11/2011
Unable to log in to a Windows virtual machine after it has been converted with VMware Converter (1038657)
Date Published: 5/10/2011

VMware Data Recovery
Windows File Level Restore client fails to mount virtual disks correctly for a virtual machine (1022273)
Date Published: 5/12/2011
Optimizing the performance when using a VMDK disk file as a deduplication store for VMware Data Recovery (1038688)
Date Published: 5/12/2011
Troubleshooting issues related to the File Level Restore Client for Linux for VMware Data Recovery (1038919)
Date Published: 5/12/2011
Troubleshooting issues related to the Windows File Level Restore Client for VMware Data Recovery (1038923)
Date Published: 5/12/2011

VMware ESX
Creating a VMFS datastore on a Compellent Storage Center SAN fails (1038617)
Date Published: 5/11/2011
Performance charts for networking do not work on ESX/ESXi 4.1 Update 1 (1038653)
Date Published: 5/12/2011

VMware ESXi
Network cards not detected on the ESX host (1034782)
Date Published: 5/11/2011
Hostd log warning: Can't convert IP Address of type 0 (1038790)
Date Published: 5/11/2011
Virtual machines become unresponsive after cluster-wide VMFS refresh (1039088)
Date Published: 5/9/2011

VMware Service Manager
Unable to change Priority after transferring calls across partitions (1037511)
Date Published: 5/13/2011
Full search in portal in VMware Service Manager 9.0 returns incorrect search results (1038372)
Date Published: 5/10/2011
Partitioned Call Templates fail to display on the portal in VMware Service Manager 9.0 with the error: There are no Call Templates available for you to log an incident (1038375)
Date Published: 5/10/2011
Creating a workflow template in VMware Service Manager fails with the error: An application error has occurred (1038379)
Date Published: 5/11/2011
Memory errors occur when exporting in Config Port due to the large size of the generated XML file (1038385)
Date Published: 5/13/2011
The Forward Schedule of Change - Change Window times are out by twice the time zone plus one hour (1038387)
Date Published: 5/13/2011
Searching for a customer in the Customer Portal of VMware Service manager fails with the error: unable to extend temp segment by 128 in tablespace (1038451)
Date Published: 5/13/2011

VMware vCenter Converter Standalone
Troubleshooting issues using VMware Converter when the conversion process is slow (1038450)
Date Published: 5/12/2011

VMware vCenter Lab Manager
Shutting down a virtual machine fails even if the the Power On/Off privilege is assigned to the user (1039213)
Date Published: 5/12/2011

VMware vCenter Operations Enterprise
vCenter Operations Enterprise Hyperic adapter fails to retrieve data (1038916)
Date Published: 5/10/2011

VMware vCenter Server
Only real time performance data is displayed when vCenter Server is configured with SQL Express 64 bit (1036085)
Date Published: 5/12/2011
VMware VirtualCenter Management Webservices fails to start (1038714)
Date Published: 5/10/2011
vCenter Server Agent automatic/manual upgrade option is not prompted when upgrading to vCenter Server 4.1 Upgrade 1 (1038887)
Date Published: 5/11/2011
Virtual machines run on a different host after a datacenter power outage affecting multiple hosts (1031488)
Date Published: 5/12/2011
Connecting to vCenter Server using the vSphere Client fails with the error: Invalid URI: The hostname could not be parsed (1033990)
Date Published: 5/10/2011
Installing vCenter Server 4.x with Oracle fails with the error: TNS:protocol adapter error (1038446)
Date Published: 5/13/2011
Powering on virtual machines that are in different DRS clusters fails for some virtual machines with the error: The operation is not allowed in the current state (1038686)
Date Published: 5/12/2011
Unable to add Active Directory users to vCenter Server (1038800)
Date Published: 5/10/2011

VMware vCenter Update Manager
Stopping, starting, and restarting the VMware Update Manager service (1039328)
Date Published: 5/13/2011

VMware vCloud Director
Remote Console functionality fails to work in VMware vCloud Director (1039129)
Date Published: 5/11/2011
NICs within the Windows virtual machine are missing after the vApp that contains the virtual machine is migrated from vCloud Director (1039352)
Date Published: 5/13/2011

VMware View Manager
No audio playback or interruption during playback when VMware View Manager uses a limited bandwidth PCoIP connection (1037524)
Date Published: 5/12/2011
View Agent logs repeatedly report the message: Disk space free threshold for log reached (1038855)
Date Published: 5/11/2011
Unable to connect to a View Desktop via the Security Server from outside the firewall (1039021)
Date Published: 5/9/2011

VMware Virtual Disk Development
Retrieving all the volume handles for Windows 2008 and Windows 7 (1030788)
Date Published: 5/11/2011

VMware VirtualCenter
vCenter Server components not available after disabling the VMware VirtualCenter Management Webservices service (1039046)
Date Published: 5/9/2011

In case you missed it, this week kicked off the public voting for sessions at VMworld 2011.  I tell all my customers that haven’t been to VMworld in the past that they are really missing out on a great learning opportunity.  Between the technical breakout sessions, and the hands-on labs, the peer collaboration is worth it alone.  Connecting and talking to other engineers to understand what they are doing in their environment and how it might differ from yours is priceless.

Voice your opinion and cast your vote today to help shape the content for this upcoming VMworld!

Vladan Seget - VMware HA Slot sizes - This post is an extension of blog discussions around VMware vSphere HA slot sizing.  If you are not familiar with the topic, start with Duncan Epping’s article HA Deepdive and review the VMware HA Admission Control section of the vSphere Availability Guide.

Jakob Fabritius Norregaard - vSphere Network Ports Diagram - Here's a great network diagram showing used ports in a vSphere environment made by Dudley Smith. Go here for current version as of 2011.05.10. I had to look for it a bit so thought I'd post the link.

Jason Boche - VMware vSphere SiteSurvey Plug-in - VMware SiteSurvey is a free add-on utility which analyzes vSphere ESX and ESXi hosts for VMware Fault Tolerance (FT) compatibility.  My good friend Eric Siebert wrote in depth about this piece of software and its capabilities just after the GA launch of VMware vSphere in 2009.

Eric Siebert - Deleting virtual machine snapshots without wasting disk space - Taking snapshots of your virtual machines (VMs) is a useful way to preserve and restore VM configurations. But proper management is needed to avoid performance problems. In this tip, we'll explore advanced snapshot management topics. (For a review of snapshot basics or review how VMware snapshots work, see my previous tip.)

Kendrick Coleman - Configuring VMware View Events Database with SQL Server - I've been rebuilding my VMware lab and decided to do it all right this time by having a centralized database server, and I choose SQL Server 2008 R2. I have configured vCenter, VUM, and View Composer to all use SQL 2008 R2 with windows authentication, then it came time to get the View Events database up and running. Jason Langone has a great article on setting up the events DB using SQL Express, but there isn't a good walkthru for regular SQL server setup. So here we go.

This is a Critical Impact Message:

To continue patching ESX/ESXi 3.5 hosts, a critical patch needs to be applied before June 1, 2011. This patch updates the secure key.

Knowledgebase Article 1030001 Critical Impact: VMware ESX 3.5, Patch ESX350-201012410-BG: Apply this patch to continue applying patches on ESX 3.5 hosts after June 2011 has been written for users of ESX.

Knowledgebase Article 1030002 Critical Impact: VMware ESXi 3.5, Patch ESXe350-201012401-I-BG: Apply this patch to continue applying patches on ESXi 3.5 hosts after June 2011 has been written for users of ESXi.

If there any updates on this message, these KBs will be updated.

We’re excited to announce that Mark Gibbs of  Network World and  PC World named VMware Fusion and VMware Workstation in his list of most crucial apps he can’t live without.

Gibbs writes about how both VMware applications make “it possible to run, in parallel, pretty much any x86-based operating system in a virtual machine on top of the host operating system.”

Continue reading "Mark Gibbs names VMware Fusion in "My Top 10 Tools" List"

Today the Support Insider brings you another new Mind Map we expect to be popular— vSphere Install & Upgrade Troubleshooting!

These interactive Flash-embedded PDFs are clickable so that you can expand sections and drill down to the problem you may be experiencing. The map is fairly large and covers a lot of topics. If you see a topic you’d like to explore, click the ‘+’. If you see an article you’d like to view, click the link icon.

This mind-map is different than some of our other mind-maps in that it is not tied to a specific Resolution Path KB article. This one covers these aspects of Install & Upgrade issues:

• ESX/ESXi
• Tools
• vCenter Server
• vSphere Client

Pick which are you are experiencing difficulties in and drill down to see how to troubleshoot it.

Download the Mind Map here>>  vSphere Install & Upgrade Troubleshooting