VMware Blogs

Yesterday, we have introduced the VMware vCloud Integration Manager which will help service providers to accelerate delivery of cloud services. The Integration Manager will allow service providers to quickly create and deploy cloud service offerings, operate at maximum efficiency and scale to meet customer demand in a reliable, repeatable and cost-effective manner.

The vCloud Integration Manager will be tightly integrated with VMware vCloud Director, VMware vSphere®, VMware vShield™ Edge and VMware vCenter™ Chargeback Manager to automate and accelerate the provisioning and delivery of infrastructure and associated services. It will provide a REST-based API to integrate with a service provider’s back office systems (CRM, billing, etc.), and a Web-based administration portal.

It will also include Web-based portals to streamline and automate service plan, customer lifecycle and reseller management. With the click of a button, service providers will be able to standardize product configuration and delivery, manage customer lifecycles from sign-up to decommission, and reduce the time and overhead involved in transacting with resellers.

In the same news, we now have nearly 90 service provider partners in our ecosystem, who now offer services that meet the criteria to be called “VMware vCloud Powered,” which is almost three times as many as we had six months ago.

And today, SlideRocket announced the “Make an Impact” contest for non-profit organizations, in which prize money of $30,000 will be split up between the winners whose SlideRocket presentations will receive the most views, and are judged by the panel to have the best stories.

The Bits blog of the New York Times has published an interview with our CEO Paul Maritz last week, in which he talks about how cloud computing will transform the information technology industry. Paul goes into some detail explaining the meaning of the cloud era in computing, and how he sees our company’s role in moving IT from client-server to big data and cloud environments.

Recently, we have also published a Desktop modernization toolkit, containing analyst reports of VMware View, to learn how our customers have benefitted from virtualization. Grab your kit today.

By William Lam, Sr. Technical Marketing Engineer

The question of uniquely identifying virtual machines in either a vSphere or vCloud environment is one that comes up from time to time. I hear you asking, why is this import to me? One such reason is to help track virtual machine assets using external systems such as a CMDB (Configuration Management Database) and being able to uniquely identify a VM across multiple vCenter Servers and/or vCloud Director Cells.

In Part 1 of this article, I will provide an overview of what is needed to uniquely identify a VM in both vSphere vCenter and vCloud Director. In Part 2, we will dive into an example using the vSphere API and vCloud API showing the relationships.

vSphere

In vSphere, to uniquely identify a virtual machine, you can use the MoRef ID (Managed Object Reference ID) or the instanceUuid of a VM which is available using the vSphere API.  

The MoRef ID is a VMware internal identifier that is generated by vSphere when new objects are created in vCenter (e.g. adding ESXi host or creating a VM). This MoRef ID is used by all VMware solutions to reference objects within vCenter. The instanceUuid is a new property that was introduced in the vSphere 4.0 API to provide an easy way to uniquely identify a VM. Previous to this, the BIOS uuid of a VM was being used to identify a VM, but it was not always guaranteed to be unique and hence a vCenter specific UUID was created.

An example of a MoRef ID for a VM would be vm-415 where “vm” identifies the object type and 415 is just a counter. An example of an instanceUuid for a VM would be 501d6aa3-54fc-8b8d-99a2-e448463ead18 which represents a 128bit identifier.

If you are managing a single vSphere environment and using vCenter Server, then you can use either property from the vSphere API to uniquely identify your VMs. If you are managing multiple vSphere environments, then you need to combine the either the MoRef ID or instanceUuid VM with the unique identifier for a given vCenter Server. Within the vCenter Server, there is also a property in the vSphere API called instanceUuid which uniquely identifies a vCenter Server. This then allows you to uniquely identify a VM across multiple vCenter Servers as the individual instanceUuid of a VM is only guaranteed to be unique across a single vCenter Server instance.

vCloud

With vCloud Director, to uniquely identify a virtual machine, you would use the vCloud Director Object ID that is automatically generated by vCloud Director when a new virtual machine is created. The vCloud Director Object ID is available using the vCloud API.

An example of a vCloud Director Object ID for a VM would be urn:vcloud:vm:71d5b81a-f82d-495a-9e58-4b95a645c841 which is expressed in URN format.

To automatically handle uniqueness of a VM across a single or multi vCloud Director Cell, there is an object reference property called href that is provided as a URL that contains information about the vCloud Director Cell and VM vCloud Director Object ID.

An example of an href for a VM would be https://vcloudurl/api/vApp/vm-71d5b81a-f82d-495a-9e58-4b95a645c841 where the UUID of the VM is captured as part of the URL.

By using the href property, you are guaranteed a unique key within vCloud Director.

vSphere and vCloud

If you need to uniquely identify a virtual machine in both vSphere and vCloud, you can still use the identifiers listed above in their respective stack but how do you go about correlating the two? As mentioned earlier, all VMware solutions leverage the MoRef ID to reference objects within vCenter. Since vCloud Director sits on top of vSphere, it too also uses the MoRef ID to map entities between the two environments. As part of the vCloud API, there is a vCloud Extension API that provides information about the underlying vSphere infrastructure including the MoRef ID of a VM and vCenter Server instanceUuid.

Here is a diagram to help visualize the unique properties between vSphere and vCloud:

From a vCloud Director VM, we can map it to a specific vCenter Server using the vCloud Extension API to retrieve the MoRef ID of the VM and instanceUuid of the vCenter Server. Using the instanceUuid, we can then correlate that back to a specific vCenter Server and find the VM with matching MoRef ID. 

It is recommended that you leverage the MoRef ID as the common identifier between vCloud and vSphere. If you are only within vCloud, then you can use href property.

If you would like more details on the importance of the MoRef ID within vCloud Director, Chris Colotti wrote an excellent article here. I would highly recommend you take a look at his article.

Additional Notes:

• If you move a VM to another Organization vDC, the href and UUID will change
• If you Import a VM from vSphere to vCloud, the VM MoRef ID will stay same if you use “move” operation. If you use “copy”, the MoRef ID will change.

Additional resources:

• vSphere API Programing Guide
• vCloud API Programming Guide
• When Do vSphere MoRef's Change?

Thanks to Michael Haines and Timo Sugliani for their feedback on the article.

Get notification of new blog postings and more by following VMware Automation on Twitter:  @VMWAutomation

The demand for cloud has grown tremendously in the last few years, with an increasing number of enterprises expressing interest in and taking advantage of private, public and hybrid cloud models. Hybrid cloud models in particular have received much attention in the last year, and in a recent Forbes article, David Nichols, principal and Americas CIO services leader for Ernst & Young IT Advisory Services, noted that hybrid cloud strategies provide a “failsafe” model for enterprises and may be the best approach to cloud computing for the enterprise.

So where does VMware fit in all this? Well last week we featured a report by the Taneja Group that discussed how VMware stacks up against other cloud vendors and why the Taneja Group considers VMware the clear cloud leader. In addition to that, check out the handy infographic below that breaks VMware down by the numbers and illustrates where VMware’s growing ecosystem of Service Provider partners fits in the cloud revolution, providing hybrid cloud services to the enterprise. 

VMware values all of its Service Provider partners, and at VMware Partner Exchange next week, we look forward to highlighting all the reasons why VMware’s ecosystem of Service Providers and partners ranks among the best in the industry. Check out yesterday’s blog for a full rundown of what to expect at VMware Partner Exchange, and don’t forget to follow @VMwareSP for live coverage from the show! 

Posted by Zack Towner
Service Provider Business
Development, VMware
Applications

The Challenge
While Email and Collaboration remain among the most important applications for businesses today, it can certainly be a burden, time consuming and costly for IT departments.

It’s difficult to keep up with things like browser and OS support not to mention supporting the myriad of devices employees use to check their email. The ever-increasing mass of attachments and documents leads to greater storage requirements and additional costs.

All of these challenges are motivating businesses to seek more flexible, lower cost alternative solutions for email and collaboration. One model that helps businesses address these challenges — IT as a Service. 

Research suggests that businesses are making the shift to IT as a Service initially with hosted email solutions.  Not surprisingly, reducing IT costs is the primary driver for this transition.

The Solution
Service providers, such as CSC, can help businesses make this shift to IT as a Service and change the role of their IT department from a cost center to a center of strategic value.

CSC has partnered with VMware to offer CSC Cloudmail: VMware Zimbra. CSC CloudMail for VMware Zimbra

This solution combines VMware Zimbra’s next-generation collaboration software with CSC managed services and Trusted Cloud data center deployment to provide Messaging as a Service. VMware Zimbra is scalable and secure, and CSC provides the choice of on- or off-premises deployment and as-a-service pricing.

Watch this video to learn more about how your business can save money, increase user productivity managed by CSC and backed by service level agreements.

To learn more about the business benefits of transitioning to cloud based email, collaboration services and key features differentiating email platforms in the cloud, check out the Business Opportunity for Cloud Mail and Collaboration Whitepaper.

If there is one thing that is sure to fire up a debate in VMware storage circles, it is whether or not a VMFS volume should make use of extents. I've watched many an email thread about this, and engaged in a few discussions myself. What I want to do in this post is show what some of the pros and cons are, explode some of the myths, and then let you make up your own mind as to whether you want to use them or not. I'll give you my own opinion at the end of the post.

What is an Extent?

Probably best to describe what an extent is first of all. A VMFS volume resides on one or more extents. Each extent is backed by a partition on a physical device, such as a LUN. Normally there will be only one extent for each LUN (whole LUN contains a single partition which is used as a VMFS extent). Extents are used when you create a VMFS volume, and more extents can added if you want to expand the volume.

The maximum size of a single VMFS-3 extent was 2TB. This was due to a number of things, including our reliance on SCSI-2 addressing and the MBR (Master Boot Record) partition format.  Adding additional extents to a VMFS-3 volume was the only way to extend it above 2TB. No single LUN/extent used for VMFS-3 could be above 2TB. Adding 32 extents/LUNs to the same VMFS-3 volume gave you a maximum size of 64TB. VMFS-5 volumes, introduced in vSphere 5.0, can be as large as 64TB on a single extent. This is because we implemented the GPT (GUID Partition Table) format & made a significant number of SCSI improvements.

This all seems ok, right? So what's the problem? Why have extents got a bad name? Let's begin by exploding a few of the myths around extents.

Misconception #1 - Extents are like RAID stripes

This is one of the common misconceptions. I've seen some folks believe that the Virtual Machines deployed on a VMFS volume (with extents) are striped (or the file blocks/clusters allocated to the VMs are striped) across the different extents.

This is not correct. Extents are not like stripes. If anything, extents are more akin to concatenations than stripes. They do not rotate Virtual Machine assignments or even VM block or cluster allocation assignments across different extents in the datastore.

I think this misconception arises because it is being confused with how resource management does things on a VMFS volume. VMFS Resource Management attempts to separate cluster resources on a per host basis to avoid any lock contentions, etc. You may observe VMs from different hosts being placed at completely different offset locations on a VMFS datastore, and perhaps even different extents. My good friend Satyam Vaghani did a very good presentation on this at his VMworld 2009 session, TA3320. The hosts try to put distance between themselves on the datastore to reduce any contention for resources, but they still try to keep the objects that they manage close together.

The X-axis represents the volume layout. The files on the left are from host A, the files to the center right are from host B. As you can see, host B’s file are offset from the start of the volume. These offsets typically follow a uniform distribution across the entire file system address space. So, in a multi-extent situation, concurrent hosts accessing a VMFS volume will naturally spread themselves out across all extents (since the address space is a logical concatenation of all extents). In effect, if you have multiple hosts accessing a VMFS volume, the load may be distributed across multiple extents. Note that if it is a single host or a very small number of hosts on a very large number of extents, the load may not be evenly distributed.

Not only that, but the resource manager also tries to allocate a contiguous range of blocks to disk files (thin, thick, eagerzeroed thick) as can be seen by this slide also taken from Satyam's presentation.

See this example of VMs with different virtual disks deployed to a VMFS-3:

Here the X axis is the volume layout, and the Y axis represents the number of blocks. Of course, as available space reduces, you could find a VM spanning two or more datastores on an extent. The same could be true for thin disks, which might need to allocate its next resource cluster from another extent.

 Because of this contiguous allocation of space (which can be in the order of 100MBs or even GB), VMFS does not suffer from the traditional fragmentation issues seen on other filesystems. However, if a file that is grown by Host A at t0 is later grown by Host B at t1, and the same resource distribution scheme per host is in play, then it is likely that file block clusters for those files will be scattered across the logical address space.  When you think about DRS management of VMs, and the use of thin disks, you can see that those disks will end up getting resources from various regions. Its still not enough to raise concerns about fragmentation however.

Misconception #2 - Losing one extent will offline the whole volume

Not completely true. Back in the VMFS-2 days, this was certainly true, but significant enhancements have been made to VMFS extents over the years that will allow a datastore to stay online even if one of its extent components is offline. See this posting I made on such enhancements. Now, we as yet don't have this surfaced as an alarm in vCenter, but it definitely something we are looking at exposing at the vCenter layer in a future release. 

However if the head extent (1^st member) has a failure, then it can bring the whole datastore offline. Head extent offline condition is pretty much always going to cause failures because many of the address resolution resources are on the head extent. Additionally, if a non-head extent member goes down, you won't be able to access the VMs whose virtual disks have at least 1 block on that extent. 

But is this really any more problematic than having an issue with a LUN which backs a single extent VMFS volume? For the most part, no. Its only when the head has an issue that this has more of an impact.

Misconception #3 - Its easy to mistakenly overwrite extents in vCenter

I've heard this still being brought up as an issue. Basically, the scenario described is where vCenter  shows LUNs (which are already used as an extents for a VMFS datastores) as free, and will let you initialize them when you do an Add Storage task.

If memory serves, the issue described here could be as old as Virtual Center 1.x (this was in the days before we started calling it vCenter). I'm pretty sure that this was resolved in version 2.x, and definitely is not an issue with the vCenter 4.x & 5.x releases. I think this occurred when you built an extent on one host, and then flipped onto a view from another ESXi host which didn't know that the LUN was now in use. These days, any changes made to a datastore, where a LUN is added as an extent, updates all the inventory objects so that this LUN is removed from the available disks pool. Coupled with the fact that we now have a cluster wide rescan option for storage, there should no longer be any concerns around this.

Obviously, if you decide to start working outside of vCenter and decide to work directly on the ESXi hosts, you could still run into this issue. But you wouldn't do that, would you? ;-)

Misconception #4 - You get better performance from extents

This is an interesting one. It basically suggests that using extents will give you better performance, because you have an aggregate of the queue depth from all extents/LUNs in the datastore. There is some merit to this. You could indeed make use of the per device queue depth to get an aggregate queue depth for all extents. But this is only relevant if a larger queue depth will improve performance, which may not always be the case. I also think that to benefit from the aggregate queue depth, each of the extents/LUNs that makes up the volume may have to be placed on different paths, or possibly you may need to implement Round Robin, which not every storage array supports. So this doesn't just work out of the box; there is some configuration necessary.

My thoughts on this are that if you are using a single extent datastore, and think a larger queue depth will give you more performance, the you can simply edit the per device queue depth and bump it up from the default value of 32 to, say 64. Of course, you should do research in advance to see if this will indeed improve your performance. And keep in mind that the max queue depth of your HBA and the number of paths to your device need to be taken into account before making any of these changes.

VMware's Best Practice/Recommendation for Extents

I discussed this with our engineering and support folks, and in all honesty, considering the management overhead with extents, the new single extent VMFS-5 volume size, the ability to grow datastores online with the volume grow facility, and the ability to tune the per device queue depth, the recommendation would be to avoid the use of extents unless you absolutely have to use them. In fact the only cases I can see where you might need extents are:

1. You are still on VMFS-3 and need a datastore larger than 2TB.
2. You have storage devices which cannot be grown at the back-end, but you need a datastore larger than 2TB.

There is nothing inherently wrong with extents, but the complexity involved in managing them has given them a bad name. Consider a 32 host cluster which shares a VMFS volume comprised of 32 extents/LUNs. This volume has to be presented to each host. It becomes quite a challenge to ensure that each host see the same LUN in exactly the same way. Now bring something like SRM (Site Recovery Manager) into the picture, and if you want to failover successfully to a remote site, all of these LUNs needs to be replicated correctly, and in the event of a failover, they may need to be resignatured and mounted on all the hosts on the DR site. So this becomes a formidable task. And it is for the complexity reason primarily that I would make this recommendation. VMFS-5 does provide better management capabilities by allowing for these larger LUN sizes, which makes a significant amount of the storage administration overhead go away.

Get notification of these blogs postings and more VMware Storage information by following me on Twitter: @VMwareStorage

AppSync is a great update mechanism for certain use cases (more information on the AppSync feature can be found here). When you have deployed a new version is it very likely you want to perform a new thinreg registration on the package. AppSync has built in support for thinreg. If you place thinreg.exe on your AppSync URL will AppSync automatically perform registration of your new version.

Instead of just writing about it have I created a video showing you the functionality. In this video am I using a UNC path but HTTP/HTTPS will work just as well.. Please enjoy..

Direct link to video: http://vimeo.com/channels/thinapp#36375955

Yes, pretty cool indeed..

By William Lam, Sr. Technical Marketing Engineer

Our documentation team just posted the vCloud API Reference HTML version online. This was previously only available as a download zip file. You can now browse the vCloud API Reference under the vCloud Director Documentation page.

In addition to vCloud API Programming Guide and the vCloud API Reference to help you get started with the vCloud API 1.5. There are two additional documents that are useful to help users who are migrating from vCloud API 1.0 to 1.5 (Thanks to Michael Haines for the tip).

• vCloud API 1.5 Migration Guide
• vCloud API 1.0 and 1.5 Differences

Here is a screenshot of what the vCloud API 1.0 to 1.5 Difference document looks like:

Get notification of new blog postings and more by following VMware Automation on Twitter:  @VMWAutomation

We are constantly hearing from developers that VMware Fusion is an essential tool in their development process. So we thought it would be cool to invite a few of them to share their stories. In this post we spoke to Shawn Hart, Lead Developer for Bullet Proof Orange. 

I live in a Mac world, but work in web design where my audience can be using any number of browsers working on any number of systems. Although browser compatibilities are slowly becoming a thing of the past (fingers crossed), the legacy of the browser wars is still very much present and when I build a site I have to keep this in mind. As a freelancing designer/developer, I'm very much a one man shop for my client's needs and don't have a  dedicated QA department that can use different machines running different OS's. Instead I use Vmware Fusion 4 on a regular basis to test my product and make sure that my clients are reaching the largest possible audience, and looking good in the process (even in Explorer 7). Having the flexibility to just open up a window and have another operating system there at my beck and call, has made life so much easier and has streamlined my workflow considerably. I love that VMware Fusion gives guys like me the ability get the most out of the Mac. Thanks VMware Fusion!

You can check out Bullet Proof Orange at bulletprooforange.com/

By: David Davis

The theme of VMware Partner Exchange (PEX) 2012 is “It Starts Here”. That ‘IT’ could mean “Information Technology” or, more likely, it’s that “it” (meaning all things virtualization and cloud computing) will start here in 2012. With only 1 week to go before PEX kickoff on February 13, 2012, I can’t wait to find out what VMware could announce, what I will learn, and who I might be able to network with at PEX this year. While competitors would beg to differ, in the VMware world, it is true that, in a new year, it ALL does start at Partner Exchange (as it does take place in the beginning of the year and is when VMware announces to partners what product pushes they will make together that year).

What Should You See at PEX?

This will be my third PEX and I have begun to think of it as “the mid-year VMworld”. However, it really isn’t VMworld because there are only VMware partners present, because a huge focus is on the sales side of VMware solutions, and because the show is around 3-4000 people (much smaller than VMworld at 15,000+). Still, it is the best mid-year VMware show for me, personally, because I get to talk to the same industry experts as VMworld, find out what VMware partners are up to, sit in VMworld-style labs, attend awesome sessions, and listen to an inspiring presentations by Paul Maritz & Dr Steven Herrod.

I always enjoy visiting the Solutions Exchange Theater to listen to VMware Partners present and showcase their solutions, services and unique capabilities. Everything from cloud architecture, networking, storage, security, management, and more is covered. VMware has one of the most impressive partner ecosystems I have ever seen.

Plus, TrainSignal (who I create vSphere video training for) will have our first ever booth at the PEX solutions exchange. Likely I’ll be there a lot so, if you attend PEX, make sure that you come by and see me!

And if you can attend, make sure you register and attend on of the awesome PEX Tweetups, parties, and gatherings. I will be at the HP Tweetup at Margaritaville so I hope to catch you there!

The Best Sessions of VMware Partner Exchange 2012

Speaking of those sessions I mentioned, what are the best sessions? I had a tough time making up my schedule because there are just so many great sessions spread across just a few days.

Here are the sessions I’m really going to try to attend:

• 2/11 at 1:30pm – #CIM1262: DR of the Cloud and to the Cloud with Chris Colotti and Duncan Epping
• 2/14 at 1:30pm – #CIM1291: Multi-tier vApp Solution Design for vCloud with John Arrasjid (VCDX #001) and Amanda Kammampati
• 2/14 at 4pm – #TEX1261: Building Apps on Top of the vCloud API with Mike DePetrillo
• 2/15 at 1:45pm – #PAR1571: Becoming a VMware Service Provider Using vCloud Powered Services with Luke Norris
• 2/15 at 4:15pm – #CIM1289: vCloud Architecture Toolkit Overview with John Arrasjid (VCDX #001)
• 2/16 at 10:15am – #CIM1269:  Upgrading the vCloud Solutions Stack in an End to End Environment with Chris Colotti and Dave Hill
• and more!

However, since I haven’t figured out how to clone myself yet and don’t have the ability to attend every PEX session that I want to, here is a list of other PEX sessions that the VMwareSP team will fortunately be live-tweeting from:

• 2/14  at 4pm – #CIM1432: How to Win with vCloud Services with Theresa Vu
• 2/15 at 2:30pm – #CIM1453: Creating Public Clouds for Regulated Verticals with Melody Hazi
• 2/15 at 4:15pm – #CIM1345: Real World Experiences: Service Providers Share Best Practices for Delivering Public and Hybrid Cloud Services with Mathew Lodge
• 2/15 at 4:15pm – #CIM1307: Automating Deployment and Operations of a vCloud Infrastructure with Amit Gupta
• 2/16 at 9am – #CIM1398: VMware Service Provider Momentum and Expansion with Kedra Simm
• 2/16 at 9am – #CIM1260: Multi-Site Cloud Deployment with Mike DiPetrillo
• 2/16 at 10:15am – #SMP1540: Selling Hybrid and Public Clouds: Solution Providers and Service Providers in Harmony with Kedra Simm
• 2/16 at 11:30am – #CIM1343: How to Sell and Deliver IaaS Clouds Powered by vCloud Service Providers with Kirti Dewan
• 2/16 at 11:30am – #CIM1311: Cloud Infrastructure Product Opportunities for Service Providers with David Baldwin

So whether you can attend, or not, make sure you are following @VMwareSP and @vCloud to catch highlights from these PEX vCloud/SP sessions.

For more great PEX sessions, make sure you checkout:

• PEX 2012 Content Catalog
• Chris Colotti's blog that highlights his vCloud session & others

Also checkout this post: What to Expect at VMware Partner Exchange 2012

Top Reasons to Attend VMware Partner Exchange 2012

If you are unfamiliar with PEX, make sure you checkout this video on the top reasons to attend:

If you haven’t already registered for PEX or haven’t built your schedule yet, make sure that you try to checkout these sessions! Register at VMware Partner Exchange (PEX) 2012.

David Davis is a VMware Evangelist and vSphere Video Training Author for TrainSignal. He has achieved CCIE, VCP, VCAP-DCA, and vExpert level status over his 18+ years in the IT industry. David has authored hundreds of articles on the Internet and over 10 video training courses for TrainSignal.com including the popular vSphere video training package. Learn more about David at his blog or on Twitter and check out a sample of his new vSphere 5 video training course over at TrainSignal.com.

Kyle Gleed, Sr Technical Marketing Manager, VMware

I just learned about the online VIB repository that HP has made available at http://vibsdepot.hp.com. 

This is a great resource and I thought I would give a quick overview on how you can access this repository to browse the contents and add the VIBs to your Image Profiles.

Begin by launching a PowerCLI session.   Use the “Connect-VIServer” cmdlet to connect to your vCenter Server.  Next, import the HP online software depot using the “Add-EsxSoftwareDepot” cmdlet:

With the depot imported, you can use the “Get-EsxSoftwarePackage” cmdlet to list all the VIBs that are included with the software depot:

To get a brief description of each VIB use the “Get-EsxSoftwarePackage” cmdlet with the “| Select Name,Description” filter for the name and description fields:

Next, I'll show how you can create your own image profile that contains one or more of the VIBs from HP’s online depot.  As we already have PowerCLI running with HP’s online software depot imported the next step is to import the ESXi 5.0 software depot. If you don’t already have a copy of the offline depot you can download it from here: http://www.vmware.com/downloads.

To import the ESXi 5.0 offline depot Run the “Add-EsxSoftwareDepot” cmdlet specifying the path to the .zip file.  Note that the 5.0 software depot comes with two default Image Profiles, one with VMware Tools and one without.  I’ll be using the image profile with VMware Tools:

Next create a new image profile using the “New-EsxImageProfile” cmdlet.  In the example below I created a new image profile named “MyProfile” by cloning the “ESXi-5.0.0-469512-standard” profile.  Note that I chose to specify the Vendor as “HP” and the acceptance level as “PartnerSupported” because I will be adding HP VIBs to my image.

Next, add the HP VIBs to the image profile using the “Add-EsxSoftwarePackage” cmdlet.  For this example I will add the “hpnmi” and “char-hpcru” VIBs.

You can verify the VIBs have been added and are now part of the image profile “MyProfile” by using the “Get-EsxImageProfile” cmdlet and expanding the viblist property (I sorted the output to make it easier to find the VIBs):

With the custom image profile created and the HP VIBs added, the next step is to save the image profile.  You can save the image as either an offline depot (.zip) or as an ISO image (.iso):

There you have it.  You now have a custom ESXi 5.0 image profile that contains VIBs from HP’s online depot.  You can use the ISO file to boot your host and install ESXi interactively via the installer or you can use the offline bundle (.zip) to import to Update Manager or use with Auto Deploy.

Whether you’re a large enterprise or small to midsized business, VMware solutions enable you to reduce costs and simplify your plans for business continuity and disaster recovery (BC/DR). 

For customer sites with up to 75 virtual machines: Save 40 percent off a 75-VM pack of VMware Site Recovery Manager™ Standard and vCenter Operations™ Enterprise.

For customer sites with more than 75 virtual machines: Introducing the Business Production Bundle, a 75-VM pack of Site Recovery Manager Enterprise, vCenter Operations Enterprise, and VMware vShield App. Purchase it now and receive 75 free Training Credits (value $7,500 USD). Training can be instructor-led or webbased and expires after one year.

For more information regarding this promotion, visit: http://www.vmware.com/go/bcdr-promo

The VMware Business Continuity/Disaster Recovery promotion is effective from February 1, 2012 to June 15, 2012.

This blog is part of a series on Virtualizing Your Business Critical Applications with VMware. To learn more, including how VMware customers have successfully virtualized SAP, Oracle, Exchange, SQL and more, visit vmware.com/go/virtualizeyourapps

VMware and Shavlik Technologies have been partners for years and decided to officially tie the knot in 2011. vCenter Protect (formerly Shavlik NetChk Protect) complements vSphere perfectly and helps medium and smaller organizations to manage the transition from physical to virtual.  With vCenter Protect, we are transforming IT solutions to enable IT generalists to take advantage of the efficiencies gained with the latest technologies, while using a simplified, easy-to-use IT Management solution at an affordable price. 

VMware vCenter Protect Essentials Plus, purpose-built for SMB and departmental needs, provides centralized patch management, asset inventory, antivirus, power management, and configuration management for both virtual and legacy physical systems in an integrated solution. This includes centralized management for Windows operating systems and the most widely used Windows-hosted applications running on both virtual and physical servers and workstations. 

The bottom line is that businesses today need to simplify and transform their IT infrastructure while at the same time, deliver greater IT-enabled services to their employees and ultimately their customers. vCenter Protect combined with vSphere is just the solution to support this business transformation.

If you are looking for the right solution to simplify your IT management needs, VMware’s Product Advisor can help you answer three short questions to determine the solution that’s perfect for your business. Click Here to launch the vCenter Protect Product Advisor.  

Today, VMware is announcing new software designed specifically for our service provider partners called vCloud Integration Manager. We developed Integration Manager to provide a simple and standardized way for service providers to provision vCloud Director, vShield and vSphere in order to more quickly get new customers up and running on a cloud service. Until now, service providers either had to do these tasks manually, or redirect valuable software development resources to writing undifferentiated "glue code" and/or automation scripts.

Integration Manager reduces operational costs by automatically stepping through the configuration process for vCloud Director to set up Virtual Data Centers, virtual networks, administrator accounts and other cloud resources that the customer has ordered. By completing this in a matter of minutes, it decreases time to revenue (the time between receiving an order for service and fulfilling it, and therefore being able to bill for service).

Integration Manager includes a full set of REST APIs and a web GUI. The GUI provides an administrator interface to define the service building blocks that make up a full cloud service for a customer. Administrators can also configure reseller accounts, and provision and de-provision customers.

The web GUI invokes the Integration Manager API to accomplish these tasks. In production at service providers, Integration Manager will mostly be driven through API calls from the service provider’s customer portal or CRM (Customer Relationship Management) systems. These are typically the “systems of record” for customer data and product orders, with Integration Manager doing the detailed provisioning work.

Integration Manager is also important for VMware's reseller partners, many of whom are looking to add cloud services to their portfolios in order to be able to sell complete hybrid clouds (combinations of public and private clouds).  To make it simple for resellers to package, price and sell vCloud Powered or vCloud Datacenter services, Integration Manager includes the notion of a cloud reseller. This capability allows a service provider to securely delegate provisioning to resellers. In turn, the resellers can directly and immediately provision and de-provision their own customers (via the API or web GUI), without having to open tickets, send emails or make phone calls.

We developed Integration Manager in response to demand from our growing vCloud service provider ecosystem.  There are now 94 clouds in 19 countries world-wide that qualify for the vCloud Datacenter or vCloud Powered status. vCloud Datacenter is a globally consistent IaaS service that's audited and certified by VMware; vCloud Powered providers offer a basic level of workload and data compatibility by using vCloud Director, the vCloud API and the OVF file format.

VMware's service provider business grew more than 200% in 2011, a testament to the momentum and rapid growth those service providers are seeing in their VMware-based clouds. With vCloud Integration Manager, we hope to further accelerate their growth and profitability by reducing operational costs and opening up new routes to market.

Frank Denneman, Senior Technical Marketing Architect, VMware

vSphere 4.1 and vSphere 5 offer the ability to create virtual machine to host affinity rules. A VM-Host affinity rule specifies an affinity relationship between a group of virtual machines and a group of hosts. There are 'mandatory' rules (designated by "must") and 'preferential' rules (designated by "should".)

DRS will honor preferential rules during load-balancing operations and Host maintenance mode operations. Mandatory rules apply to non-DRS operations even in a DRS cluster, such as manual power-on operations, manual vMotions or VMware HA host failover events. 

The intended use case for mandatory rules is ISV licensing compliance. This use case is considered important enough to leave the rules active even after DRS is not available, such as a vCenter outage or when DRS is disabled. Therefore disabling DRS will not indirectly remove the mandatory rules.

Before disabling DRS, remove mandatory rules first. After disabling DRS, the vSphere client does not continue to show the rules tab for the affinity rules. You will need to re-enable DRS, remove the rules and then disable DRS.

You probably have heard about Google+, but most people haven't really checked out this new social network. Google+ has some of the good qualities of both Twitter and Facebook, and it could turn out to be quite a nice way for IT professionals interested in VMware, virtualization, cloud computing, and IT transformation to hang out.

Google+ has some of the nicer qualities of Twitter, in that you can follow your interest graph, not your social graph. If you're reading this blog, that means you can follow fellow IT professionals and talk about jumbo frames without Aunt Helga asking how you're going to attach them to the wall.

However, if you've ever played with Twitter, you probably quickly realized that with everybody's tweets zipping by 140 characters at a time, it's hard to actually have a conversation, say about enabling jumbo frames on your management network, especially with more than two people or over a few days. Google+ solves this, like Facebook, by having threaded comments that let you go back and forth about a topic.

Google+ also shares some of the downsides of both Facebook and Twitter. Like Facebook, you get a lot of funny pictures being shared in your stream. And like Twitter, you have to build your own network to actually see anything being shared.

To solve that last problem, we've started the VMware Google+ Community Circle. It's a circle of people interested in VMware, virtualization, cloud, and IT transformation. It's completely opt in: only the people who want to connect and talk with each other are in the circle.

To get started, once you have a Google+ account, go over to this Google+ post and click the "Add Circle" link inside the circle. You can make a new circle or add it to one of your existing circles. Boom! You now can start to see what these folks are posting and start sharing to them as well. 

To get added to the circle, first you have to "circle" the VMware page on Google+ -- add us to your circles. This is a Google+ rule to prevent us from spamming anybody. Then add a comment on the Community Circle Post to let us know you'd like to be added! It's as simple as that. Every week or two we'll re-share the Community Circle -- just add it again to your circles and it'll add all the new people. When we get up to the limit of 500 people, we'll just make a new circle!

We'll see you all over at Google+! We'll be sharing some exclusive content over there as well as having live video hangouts now and then.

--John & the VMware Social Media Crew

Hosts
John Troyer
Alex Maier

Guests
Hemant Gaidhani, VMware
Hassen Abdu, VMware
Shrikam Goplaswyami,VMware

Link to Audio Recording
vCenter Infrastructure Navigator & Chargeback

Virtualization News
VMTN Community Platform Layout - New Tabs (Google+, Linkedin, Groups, Podcasts)
The Cloud Vendor Landscape – The VMware Advantage According to the Taneja Group
Preserving Multi-Cloud Choice and Flexibility with Cloud Foundry “Open PaaS”
LonVMUG Best Community Presentation of 2011 Awards
John Troyer Google+ Virtualization Circle
Toronto VMUG User Conference - Feb 7, 2012 Join the conversation on twitter #tovmug

Show
VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator - Visualize Dependencies - enables application-aware management of infrastructure and operations to better understand the impact of change, provide more complete disaster recovery protection and minimize downtime.

Download your eval NOW - VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator

VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator Documentation

VMware Infrastructure Navigator discussion forum

VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator - Delivered as a virtual appliance, vCenter 5.0 is a requirement

VMware vCenter Chargeback Manager - Improve utilization of virtual infrastructure with accurate visibility into the true costs of virtualized workloads.

Download your eval NOW - VMware vCenter Chargeback Manager

VMware vCenter Chargeback discussion forum

VMware vCenter Chargeback Manager Connector For IT Business Management Suite

VMware IT Business Management Suite (ITBM) - gives you the right level of visibility into the costs, utilization and service levels of IT services, CIOs can plan, manage and optimize the cost, value, and alternatives in the emerging world of dynamic IT.

vCenter Orchestrator plugin for vCenter Chargeback Manager - coming soon!

Additional Links

VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator Videos

By Tina de Benedictis, Technical Marketing Manager, Enterprise Desktop

When you have ThinApp virtualized applications installed in a VMware View virtual desktop environment, what do you need to do to set up antivirus protection?

You may think that ThinApp virtualized applications protect the desktop from viruses and other malware during application use because of the “virtual bubble” created for user activity. Yes, the ThinApp “virtual bubble” can offer a layer of protection against runtime modifications to files and registry keys. But running ThinApp virtualized applications is similar to running native applications on the desktop: you need to protect the desktop.

Configuring the ThinApp package to be fully isolated from the host desktop would give you more of a chance of protection against malware intrusions on the desktop. However, fully isolating a ThinApp package from the host desktop would mean that the package could not even read system files. In general, you configure a ThinApp isolation mode that allows at least some reading of files from the host desktop, and often you allow some writing to the desktop, such as to the My Documents and Desktop folders.

When you set up the isolation mode for a ThinApp package, you are specifying the permissions to read from and write to the host desktop. All writes that cannot go to the host system instead go to the ThinApp application sandbox. The sandbox is a folder on the local desktop system or on a file share and is open to malware as are other files, and you also need to scan the sandbox.

You generally choose a ThinApp isolation mode setting where host system files are protected from writes. But non-system files can be written to, so you need to scan the host desktop system. Even nonpersistent View desktops need scanning so that files do not become corrupted during a View session.

For details on isolation modes, see Configuring Isolation Modes for the File System and Registry in ThinApp (Video Included).

Here is a summary of recommendations regarding ThinApp packages from a recently updated white paper on antivirus protection in a VMware View environment (Antivirus Practices with VMware View 5).

• Desktop where the ThinApp package is running: Run scheduled, on-demand virus scans of the View desktop, including during a user session. This includes scans of nonpersistent View desktops.
• ThinApp packages: When you create ThinApp packages, be sure to use a clean capture machine. Do not install a virus scanner or firewall on the capture machine.  

A Clean Capture Machine

Before you build the ThinApp package (the build machine does not have to be the same as the capture machine), run a virus scan against the ThinApp application project directory.

The Application Project Directory on the Build Machine, Which Can Be Different from the Capture Machine 

• ThinApp Repository: Scan the View ThinApp Repository (Windows application share) periodically for viruses and malware. Use on-demand scanning during periods of low usage. If you are required to use on-access scanning, create separate primary data containers for ThinApp packages that are larger than a couple of megabytes. For details, see the white paper.
• Packages destined for the ThinApp Repository: Scan ThinApp packages before you place them in the ThinApp Repository.
• Package vulnerabilities: Consider using the eEye Retina vulnerability management tool to check your ThinApp packages.
• ThinApp application sandbox: Scan the ThinApp application sandbox, whether or not you delete it upon logout. The sandbox is a standard, readable folder in Windows. Exclude the sandbox from on-access scanning, and use on-demand scanning during periods of low usage. If a virus is detected in the sandbox, clean or delete the sandbox. A new sandbox is generated on the next application use.

A ThinApp Application Sandbox Folder 

• Sandbox within Persona Management: If you use View Persona Management with nonpersistent View desktops and do not want to retain the ThinApp application sandbox, exclude the sandbox from roaming.
• External drives: Because ThinApp package users can write to network drives and removable disks, regardless of the ThinApp isolation mode setting, scan these external drives with your virus checker, or guard against writes to these drives by setting Package.ini parameters.

For more detail on the above recommendations, see the longer white paper: Antivirus Practices with VMware View 5.

by Tom Stephens, Senior Technical Marketing Architect, VMware

Evaluating software to make sure that it is fit for purpose in your environment can be a time consuming task.  One has to acquire the hardware, get the software, and configure the environment.  Only then can they get to the business of performing the evaluation.  Of course, virtualization helps here.  Just a quick look at the VMware Virtual Appliance Marketplace and you’ll see hundreds of pre-packaged solutions ready for you to download and play with.

Of course, VMware provides virtual appliances of its software as well.  By going to VMware.com, you can download virtual appliances for vCenter Server, vCenter Orchestrator, and even vCloud Director! 

By using the vCloud Director Appliance, you can have a fully functional vCD environment ready in minutes.  In the current version, the vCD Appliance even contains an embedded Oracle 11g R2 Express Edition (XE) database that eliminates the need to configure an external database.

Now the vCloud Director Appliance does have some limitations.  As it’s only intended for use with evaluations of vCloud Director, the scale of the deployment is limited to:

• One vCloud Director cell
• Two vCenter Servers
• 10 organization vDCs
• 100 virtual machines
• Up to 11GB of information stored in the embedded database

As you can see, these limitations are generous enough to let you build out quite a large environment for your evaluation.

After you sign in to evaluate vCloud Director, you will be presented with the option to download the vCloud Director Appliance as an .ova file.  This .ova file can then be deployed through an existing vSphere environment as normal.  Once done, you’ll see you have a CentOS 5.6 based VM that serves as the vCloud Director Appliance. 

Complete step-by-step instructions for configuring the vCloud Director Appliance can be found in the vCloud Director 1.5 Evaluation Guide.

The appliance is intended to be a plug-and-play solution for evaluation environments.  Due to this, there shouldn’t be any maintenance required on your part.  However, if you need to, here is the login information for the vCloud Director Appliance:

Username = root

Password = Default0

Additionally, the account information to access the embedded Oracle XE database is:

Username = vcloud

Password = VCloud

The vCloud Director Appliance is a fairly recent release, having just been released in Nov 2011.  As such, there are not too many known issues.  In fact, off the top of my head, I can only name one:

1. Ability to use the vCloud Director Appliance with VMware vCenter Chargeback Manager.  Currently, there are some issues trying to integrate Chargeback with a instance of the vCloud Director Appliance.  VMware is aware of this and we are testing a fix to the issue now.  Expect to see a KB article out soon on this.

 Performing an evaluation of vCloud Director using the appliance is certainly something you should consider.  It will no doubt save you a lot of time!

Recently, there were some changes made to VMware blog site. 

In that process we have moved the networking blog from its old site blogs.vmware.com/networking to the new site blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/networking.

From now on all new posts will be posted on this new site blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/networking.

I think the content of the old site will remain there. I will try and see if I can have the old blog posts moved to the new site.

So please update your bookmarks.

Also, I wanted to let you know that the VDS best practices paper is now available to download here.

By William Lam, Sr. Technical Marketing Engineer

In our previous article, we quickly looked at the differences between an API and an SDK. In this article, we will take a look at a high level summary of what makes up the vSphere API.

Overview

The vSphere API provides an interface for users to access the capabilities and features of the vSphere platform which includes the vCenter Server and ESX(i) hosts. Capabilities such as host management, virtual machine provisioning, monitoring, etc. are exposed as a Web Services API from both a vCenter Server and ESX(i) host. Depending on the feature, certain functionalities of the API will only be available at the vCenter Server (e.g. VM Cloning or Storage DRS).

Documentation

The complete vSphere API is documented in the vSphere API Reference guide which is available online and can also be downloaded here.

Licensing

Access to the vSphere API is governed by the various vSphere Editions which provides both read and write access to the API. If you are using vSphere Hypervisor (free edition of ESXi), the vSphere API will only be available as read-only.

Object Model

In order to retrieve properties, perform operations or modify entities within the vSphere API, it is important to understand the vSphere Object Model’s structure and relationships. The vSphere API consists of three types of objects: Managed Object which is a server side object, Managed Object Reference which is a client reference to a Managed Object and Data object which contains information about a Managed object.  

Inventory Hierarchy

The vSphere API organizes its entities (Datacenter, HostSystem, VirtualMachine, etc) in an inventory hierarchy. This inventory hierarchy structure is similar for both a vCenter Server and an ESX(i) host, but for a vCenter Server, it can be more complex. Understanding the hierarchy and the object relationships is crucial for navigating and searching through the vSphere API. 

Property Collector

The property collector is a very important interface in the vSphere API as it provides a way to monitor and retrieve properties of managed objects in the vSphere inventory. The property collector may seem complex, but it is a very powerful tool once you understand how it works. The functionality of the property collector is abstracted in some of our vSphere SDKs to make it easy to use but is also available directly for advanced users who want to leverage the full capabilities of the property collector.

Permissions, Roles and Privileges

Users must be authorized to perform any type of operation using the vSphere API. This authorization is governed by permissions, roles and privileges which are constructs within the vSphere API.

• A Permission associates a user or group with a role
• A Role is assigned to one or more privilege
• A Privilege defines a basic right (e.g. power on or reset a VM)

An entity in vSphere can have multiple permissions, but only one permission per user or group.

Hopefully this introduction provided you with a good overview of the vSphere API. In the next few articles, we will dive into more details on the vSphere Object Model, Inventory Hierarchy and Property Collector. Stay tuned!

Get notification of new blog postings and more by following VMware Automation on Twitter:  @VMWAutomation

The deadline is fast approaching - Tuesday, February 7. The bloggers that talk about VMware, virtualization and cloud computing (see a subset over at Planet V12n) work hard and bring a lot of value to their readers. 

If you're a blog reader, head over to Eric Siebert's joint at vote.vsphere-land.com and put down some votes for your favorite read! 

Voting now open for the top VMware & virtualization blogs | vSphere-land

There are over 180 blogs dedicated to VMware virtualization, here’s your chance to pick your favorites and determine the top blogs. The last voting was over a year ago and new bloggers are springing up every month. When casting your votes please keep the following in mind about the blogs.

• Longevity - Anyone can start a blog but it requires dedication, time & effort to keep it going. Some bloggers start a blog only to have it fall to the wayside several months later. Things always come up in life but the good bloggers keep going regardless of what is happening in their life.
• Length - It’s easy to make a quick blog post without much content, nothing wrong with this as long as you have good content in the post that people will enjoy. But some bloggers post pretty long detailed posts which takes a lot of time and effort to produce. The tip of the hat goes to these guys that burn the midnight oil trying to get you some great detailed information.
• Frequency - Some bloggers post several times a week which provides readers with lots of content. This requires a lot of effort as bloggers have to come up with more content ideas to write about. Frequency ties into length, some do high frequency/low length, some do low frequency/high length, some do both. They’re all good and require a lot of time and effort on the bloggers part.
• Quality - It all comes down to whats in the blog post regardless of how often or how long the blog posts are. After reading a blog post if you come away with learning something that you did not previously know and it benefits you in some way then you know you are reading a quality post. Good quality is usually the result of original content, its easy to re-hash something previously published elsewhere, the good bloggers come up with unique content or put their own unique spin on popular topics.

Are you still using VMware Server? Now is the time to consider VMware Workstation 8 as an alternative.

In June 2011 VMware ended support for VMware Server and while you are free to continue using VMware Server, you will no longer gain the benefits of newer technologies or support. If you are a software developer, QA engineer, or IT administrators who cannot meet the hardware requirements or dedicate a server to us our free VMware vSphere Hypervisor, we believe the recently released VMware Workstation 8 offers an excellent alternative to VMware server.

Simplicity

Workstation can be easily installed on existing Windows or Linux systems with minimal hardware requirements. Workstation can run on many versions of Windows and Linux including Windows 7 and Ubuntu 11.10. Furthermore, it’s very easy to try Workstation and see if it meets your needs by downloading our free 30-day trial.

Run as a Server

Workstation 8 has a very exciting new feature that allows a user to “share” their VMs. Now you can run virtual machines as a service and it will no longer require a user to always be logged in. This service is the same service used by other VMware products such as VMware Server and ESX and it provides many of the capabilities you need to get your work done.  To run as a service and share a VM, it’s a simple process of dragging and dropping a VM into the shared VM’s folder.  (click to zoom images)

Control

Shared VMs include an extensive permissions interface to allow administrators to control who can access them and what the user can do.  The VMs can even be accessed remotely by another instances of Workstation.  We believe that many of our users will find the sharing function to be a great way to run server operating systems in more of a production like environment.

Transition to the cloud

If you choose to start with Workstation there is a simple process to migrate your VMs to vSphere at any point in the future. Virtual machines running in Workstation are compatible with vSphere. Even better, Workstation makes is very easy to move virtual machines to vSphere. Workstation can be remotely connected to vSphere enabling a ‘drag and drop’ upload of VMs from Workstation to vSphere.

Migrate from VMware Server

To run Workstation on the same hardware as VMware Server, follow the steps below:

1. Shutdown VMs on VMware Server. Check to ensure the hardware meets VMware Workstation’s system requirements.

2. Uninstall VMware Sever before installing VMware Workstation. Be sure not to delete any virtual machines.

3. Install VMware Workstation.

4. VMs can be moved to the “My Virtual Machine” folder under “My documents” if desired, but this is not required.

5. Continue with “final steps” below.

To run Workstation on separate hardware from VMware Server, follow the steps below:

1. Install VMware Workstation on selected hardware.

2. Shut down the VMs on VMware Server.

3. Copy the VMs from the VMware Server hardware to the “My Virtual Machine” folder under “My documents” on the hardware running VMware Workstation.

4. Continue with “final steps” below.

Final Steps

1. Once VMware Workstation is running, follow these steps to get each virtual machine up and running.

2. From the “File” menu, select “Open” to open the file dialog box.

3. Select a virtual machine. The selected VM will now be listed in the virtual machine library under “My Computer”.

4. To run the VM locally, power on the VM.

5. To run the VM in Workstation’s server mode, within the virtual machine library, drag and drop the VM on top of the “Shared VMs” icon.

6. The “Share VM Wizard” will open. Enter a name, and choose the option to move or clone the VM, and then click “Finish”.

7. Power on the VM. At the prompt: “moved” or “copied”, select “moved”.

8. To control access to the VM, right click on the VM’s icon and select “manage”, “Permissions…”

9. Repeat the above steps for each VM.

Try Workstation today.

If you would like to discuss this in more detail, please join us in the VMware Workstation community.

Posted by Kannan Mani
Technical Solutions Architect

Check out the video below where Jason Kosaftis from EMC and I discuss on the upcoming joint webcast series -  virtualizing Oracle databases. The combination of VMware vCenter™ and EMC FAST Cache dynamically provisions server and storage resources to allow maximum performance at scale in virtualized Oracle environments. With the latest release of VMware vSphere® and the fully automated Storage Tiering capabilities of EMC VNX Unified Storage, Oracle DBAs and IT infrastructure teams can now accelerate server and storage resource provisioning and minimize database performance tuning while maintaining maximum availability.

During these webcasts you will hear from EMC and VMware Engineers, as well as end customers and IT executives from some of our largest customers discuss on cost savings, performance and efficiency they have achieved using VMware and EMC technologies. Please visit the links below and register today.

Maximum Performance and Availability for Virtualized Oracle Databases with VMware and EMC
Hosts: George Trujillo, Tier One Database Specialist, VMware and Sam Lucido, Solutions Consultant, EMC

Thursday, February 16, 2012, 8:00 AM PST
Register today!

Tuesday, February 28, 2012, 9:00 AM PST
Register today!

With all the great sessions and events taking place at VMware Partner Exchange, we thought it would be helpful to give a rundown of what attendees can expect at PEX 2012. We’ll be on-site at the show, providing photos, videos, and live-tweets straight from Las Vegas, so be sure to follow us on Twitter and Facebook.

Activities at the VMware Booth

At the VMware Booth (#1300), PEX attendees will have the opportunity to learn more about VMware Partner Programs, Products and Solutions through 16 demo stations, including live demos of the new vCloud Integration Manager (vCIM) and vCloud Connector 1.5.

Service Provider Pavilion

Be sure to drop by the Service Provider Pavilion, an area created exclusively for VSPP partners to exhibit their offerings. Inside the Pavilion attendees will have the opportunity to speak with experts and learn more about virtualization and cloud solutions from VMware Service Providers such as Bluelock, Hosting.com, iLand and more.

The Solutions Exchange

This year at PEX the Solutions Exchange will feature over 80 of the leading virtualization and cloud infrastructure companies.

The Solutions Exchange hours are:
Tuesday, Feb. 14: 11am – 6pm
(with Happy Hour taking place from 4:30-6pm)
Wednesday, Feb. 15: 11am – 6pm

There will also be a Welcome Reception in the Solutions Exchange on Monday, Feb. 13 from 5:30-7:30pm. PEX attendees won’t want to miss this opportunity to explore the Solutions Exchange and interact with peers, partners and the VMware team. 

While you’re at the Solutions Exchange, also be sure to drop by the Solutions Exchange Theater where Key VMware Partners will be presenting and showcasing their solutions, services and unique capabilities. 

From cloud architecture to security to storage and management, these live presentations highlight the power of VMware’s Partner Ecosystem. Check out the schedule below: 

Other Events

VMware PEX Tweetup
Tuesday, Feb. 14, 4:30-6pm
Drinks are on the house Tuesday night in the VMware Community Lounge! We encourage our regular #cloudtalk participants to grab a “tweetini” and come mingle with the global VMware partner social media community, where you can get your VMware questions answered by VCDXs, the VMware Certification Team, the VMware Partner Readiness Team and more.

We’ll be covering the tweetup with live photos and videos, so be sure to follow us @VMwareSP to join the event virtually, and don’t forget to RSVP here.

VMware Partner Exchange Awards
Tuesday, Feb. 14, 6:30-10pm
Congratulations to our regional 2011 Service Provider Partner of the Year winners, iland (Americas), OVH (EMEA) and Fujitsu Australia (APJ)! VMware Partner Network Awards are awarded to partners that offer the most innovative and comprehensive cloud solutions to their customers, and our global Service Provider Partner of the Year winner will be announced during the Partner Exchange Awards on Tuesday night.

VMware Partner Appreciation Party
Wednesday, Feb. 15, 7-10pm
This is the night you don’t want to miss, when we pull out all the stops to show our partners how much you mean to VMware. At the Partner Appreciation Party, attendees will have the opportunity to network with peers, meet colleagues and hear the Barenaked Ladies perform. This event promises to be one of the biggest highlights of an amazing week, so block out your busy schedules now! 

Trivia and Giveaways
If you followed @vCloud and @VMwareSP during VMworld 2011, then you’ll remember our #vTrivia prize contest. In addition to our #vTrivia gift card giveaway, we’ll also be hosting a Photo Scavenger Contest for our grand prize, an iPad 2!

#vTrivia - how to play:

• During the show, follow the @VMwareSP handle on Twitter, and look out for trivia questions posted with the #vTrivia hashtag.
• #vTrivia questions will cover big announcements at PEX, as well as highlights from key PEX sessions and events.
• If you think you know the answer to a #vTrivia question, @reply to @VMwareSP with your guess, making sure to tag your tweets with #vTrivia.

Our Photo Scavenger Contest will be held throughout the week, and one lucky winner will get to take home a new iPad 2 on Wednesday night. Here’s how to play:

• In order to win, take three pictures of yourself at the booths of any three of the following Service Providers in the Service Provider Pavillion (AirVM, Bluelock Corporation, CSC, RackForce Networks, Inc, SunGard Availability Services, Terremark North America, Verio, Xtium, iland, PhoenixNAP, Hosting.com, NTT Communications).
• Tweet all three pictures to the @VMwareSP Twitter handle any time during the conference, but all entries must be received before Wednesday, Feb. 15 at 4pm.
• You MUST be in the picture in order to win – and we’ll give you extra bonus points for including a booth staff member in the picture with you!
• We’ll go through all eligible entries by Wednesday, Feb. 15 at 4pm, and one lucky winner will be chosen at random to win our grand prize, an iPad 2!

Partner Exchange is building up to be an exciting event, so be sure to follow us @VMwareSP for live updates from the show! 

Beginning February 1 through June 15^th, 2012 you can receive free training to build your understanding and mastery of vSphere when you purchase a VMware vSphere® Acceleration Kit with Management. This promotion gives you 35 Training Credits ($3500 value) to use towards a variety of instructor-led and online self-paced training courses that help you understand and master the functionality in vSphere 5 and our other management products.

If you’re trying to master vSphere for the first time, use these credits to take our flagship introductory course VMware vSphere 5: Install, Configure, Manage. If you’re already familiar with the vSphere platform, select from a variety of courses on vCloud Director, vShield App and Edge, Site Recovery Manager, among our other products.

Our vSphere Acceleration Kits with Management just launched this past November and aim to help you build out a scalable virtualized infrastructure that maximizes IT efficiency, security, multi-site availability, and application service levels. Three different kits are available to cater to your IT and business needs:

• VMware vSphere Standard Acceleration Kit with Smart Operations Management, which offers performance management to maximize your IT infrastructure efficiency.

• VMware vSphere Enterprise Acceleration Kit with Business Production Management, which provides multi-site availability and protection of your business critical applications from network-based threats.

• VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus Acceleration Kit with Cloud Infrastructure Management, which transforms your datacenter into on-demand private clouds that accelerate your delivery and consumption of IT services.

For more information on these kits, click here.

In a previous video we showed you how to get started with PowerCLI 5.0.1 and specifically the vCloud Director (vCD) cmdlets, we show you how to gain a list of cmdlets which were added to PowerCLI 5.0.1 for managing vCD and how to use some of these cmdlets to gather data from your vCD infrastructure.

I received some comments from people saying this was great information and they could use this to write some scripts which would allow them to pull data from the vCD infrastructure, but how could they interact with vCD ?  At the moment the web interface gives them access to not only view the cloud data but also interact with it, stop/start vApp’s and VM’s, create new Organization’s, ProvidervDC’s, OrgvDC’s and much much more.

You may not know but this functionality is actually available in the PowerCLI 5.0.1 cmdlets.  When listing the cmdlets you will see that most start with “Get-“ which means they are mainly designed to retrieve the data.  People who have looked a little further or perhaps have slightly more PowerCLI knowledge will have noticed the cmdlet Get-CIView.

The Get-CIView cmdlet allows us to reach into the full SDK for vCloud Director and pull back the full .Net object, this basically means that we get access to perform anything in vCloud Director that you would normally do via the web interface.

Another way to retrieve the .Net View representation  of a PowerCLI object is to refer to its .ExtensionData property.

The .ExtensionData property is an “on-demand” property which gives us the same results as calling the Get-CIView cmdlet.

To see a simple example of how we might use this .Extensiondata property to interact with vCD and Start/Stop a vApp take a look at the below video example:

From this simple example we can then create PowerShell advanced functions to make this easier for us in the future as can be seen below, this will give us 2 functions which will allow us to easily stop and start vApps in the cloud using PowerCLI.

function Stop-CIVApp {
    <#
        .SYNOPSIS
            Powers Off a vApp.

        .DESCRIPTION
            Powers Off a vApp and all VMs within it.

        .PARAMETER  CIVApp
            The Name or object or collection of objects of vApps which to shutdown.

        .PARAMETER    Force
            Attempt to power off the VMs. Failures in undeploying the VM or associated networks are ignored.
            All references to the vApp and its VMs are removed from the database

        .EXAMPLE
            PS C:\> Get-CIVApp | Stop-CIVApp

        .EXAMPLE
            PS C:\> Get-CIVApp "MyvApp" | Stop-CIVApp

        .EXAMPLE
            PS C:\> Stop-CIVApp -CIVApp "MyvApp"

        .EXAMPLE
            PS C:\> Stop-CIVApp -CIVApp "MyvAPP" -Force
    #>
    [CmdletBinding(
        SupportsShouldProcess=$true,
        ConfirmImpact="High"
    )]
    param(
        [parameter(Mandatory=$true,ValueFromPipeline=$true,ValueFromPipelineByPropertyName=$true)]
        $CIVApp,
        [Switch]$Force
        )
    Process {
        if ($pscmdlet.ShouldProcess($CIVAPP)) {
            If ($Force){
                $CIVApp | Foreach {
                    $_.ExtensionData.Undeploy("force")
                }
            } Else {
                $CIVApp | Foreach {
                    $_.ExtensionData.Undeploy("powerOff")
                }
            }
        }
    }
}

function Start-CIVApp {
    <#
        .SYNOPSIS
            Powers On a vApp.

        .DESCRIPTION
            Powers On a vApp and all VMs within it.

        .PARAMETER  CIVApp
            The Name or object or collection of objects of vApps which to start.

        .EXAMPLE
            PS C:\> Get-CIVApp | Start-CIVApp

        .EXAMPLE
            PS C:\> Get-CIVApp "MyvApp" | Start-CIVApp

        .EXAMPLE
            PS C:\> Start-CIVApp -CIVApp
    #>
    [cmdletbinding()]
    param(
        [parameter(ValueFromPipeline=$true)]
        $CIVApp
        )
    Process {
        $CIVApp | Foreach {
            $_.ExtensionData.PowerOn()
        }
    }
}

Posted by Cormac Hogan
Technical Marketing Manager (Storage)

On a number of occasions recently, I had to investigate what happened to a Raw Device Mapping (RDM) when:

• The VM to which the RDM was attached was Storage vMotion'ed (VM Powered On)

• The VM to which the RDM was attached was Cold Migrated (VM Powered Off)

Some of you may even have been following along the comments in some of my previous postings. Well, this is what I observed, testing with both pRDMs and vRDMs.

VM with Physical (Pass-Thru) RDMs (Powered On - Storage vMotion):

• If I try to change the format to thin or thick, then no Storage vMotion allowed.
• If I chose not to do any conversion, only the pRDM mapping file is moved from the source VMFS datastore to the destination VMFS datastore - the data stays on the original LUN.

VM with Virtual (non Pass-Thru) RDMs (Power On - Storage vMotion):

• On a migrate, if I chose to covert the format in the advanced view, the vRDM is converted to a VMDK on the destination VMFS datastore.
• If I chose not to do any conversion, only the vRDM mapping file is moved from the source VMFS datastore to the destination VMFS datastore - the data stays on the original LUN (same behaviour as pRDM)

VM with Physical (Pass-Thru) RDMs (Powered Off - Cold Migration):

• On a migrate, if I chose to change the format (via the advanced view), the pRDM is converted to a VMDK on the destination VMFS datastore.
• If I chose not to do any conversion, only the pRDM mapping file is moved from the source VMFS datastore to the destination VMFS datastore - the data stays on the original LUN

VM with Virtual (non Pass-Thru) RDMs (Power Off - Cold Migration):

• On a migrate, if I chose to covert the format in the advanced view, the vRDM is converted to a VMDK on the destination VMFS datastore.
• If I chose not to do any conversion, only the vRDM mapping file is moved from the source VMFS datastore to the destination VMFS datastore - the data stays on the original LUN (same behaviour as pRDM).

As you can see, there are 3 occasions when an RDM could be converted to a VMDK. Perhaps the most surprising is the fact that a pRDM could be converted to a VMDK, when a cold migration of the VM is attempted, and the format is changed.

I've since asked our engineering team to put a warning into the migration wizard in vSphere to highlight that this is what's going to happen. Right now, you don't get any warning about this.

I wanted to finish this post with a question to the community. How useful would you find an RDM -> RDM migration tool, i.e. the ability to move data from one LUN to another LUN via the vSphere migration wizard? Please leave me a note in the comments if you think you would use this?

Get notification of these blogs postings and more VMware Storage information by following me on Twitter: @VMwareStorage

The virtual Insanity blog has a good article describing the VMware virtual Customer Lab (vCL) consisting in a fully automated cloud solution where users can checkout VMware software solutions for 14 days of testing and training/education.

The article explains what is the vCL and how it works. A part of the solution involves a vCO powered request / approval portal. Read more about it here.

By Duncan Epping, Principal Architect, VMware.

As promised last week an update that includes new white papers. First one is by Venky Deshpande and is about VDS best practices, highly recommend read. The second paper is by VMware's storage guru Cormac Hogan. Anything that Cormac writes is worth reading in my opinion. There's more papers in the pipeline so keep checking these updates.

White paper:

• VDS Best Practices Guide (Venky Deshpande) 
  http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10250
• VMware vSphere 5 VMFS-5 Upgrade Considerations (Cormac Hogan)
  http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10242
  ** yes we are aware there is an issue with the download of the PDF, been reported hopefully fixed soon! ** 

Blog posts:

• vCloud Director Certification (Tom Stephens) http://bit.ly/ykVzBp
• Having a performance problem hard to resolve? – Have you checked your host BIOS lately… (Leah Schoeb) http://bit.ly/wqgGTh
• Troubleshooting Auto Deploy Rules (Kyle Gleed) http://bit.ly/yujJ0o
• Enterprise Social Collaboration Solutions (Duncan Epping) bit.ly/y4XO17
• vCD Support for vCenter Foundation (Tom Stephens) http://bit.ly/zvJqPQ
• Checking the Pay-As-You-Go MHz Issue (Alan Renouf) http://bit.ly/w2s8iI
• What could be writing to a VMFS when no Virtual Machines are running? (Cormac Hogan) bit.ly/AuYq6G
• Something I didn't known about VMFS sub-blocks (Cormac Hogan) bit.ly/z9tFiM
• Creating an IP-Pool for VC Ops (Duncan Epping) http://bit.ly/yKSLdM
• Configuration Settings for ALUA Devices (Cormac Hogan) http://bit.ly/yeUsvc

Whilst sitting in a vCD Deep Dive presentation by Aidan Dalgliesh and David Hill last week at the London VMUG they explained an issue which has been reported on multiple occasions, they have seen this more than once on customer deployments and the issue had been reported on the internet both by Massimo Re Ferre and Kendrick Coleman.

When setting up a new Organization vDC with a Pay-As-You-Go model the default vCPU Speed is set to 0.26 GHz, most people continue on through the wizard without changing this and end up crippling their VMs as this adds a CPU limit onto the VM meaning the VM will never get past this speed limit.

This of course gives us a great reason to produce a one-liner from the PowerCLI vCD snapin to check your complete cloud infrastructure for any Organization vDCs which may have this default still enabled.

Get-OrgVdc | Where {$_.AllocationModel -eq "PayAsYouGo"} | Where {$_.ExtensionData.VCpuInMhz -eq 260}

As you can see, the above one-liner firstly grabs all Organization vDCs and then checks these to see if their allocation model is “PayAsYouGo”, once it has found these it will check the vCPUInMHZ property to see if it is set to 260 or 0.26GHz.

An example of this can be seen below:

VMware will be performing system maintenance to several VMware web applications Friday, February 17, 7:00 PM to 8:00 PM Pacific Time.

If you need to file a support request while the upgrade is in progress, you will need to call VMware Technical Support for assistance. Our 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.

Posted by Gina Bollenback
Global Alliance Marketing
Communications Manager

In this week’s News Around the Network, we focused on highlighting successful joint products, upcoming events, and valuable resources for VMware and partner customers:

FlexPod Success Story: The Walz Group (The Virtual Storage Guy)
NetApp’s Vaughn Stewart highlights a key success story for FlexPod, including how the solution was implemented and results it achieved.

New EMC + vSphere Techbooks – Get ‘em While They’re Hot! (Virtual Geek)
EMC’s Chad Sakac offers the latest downloadable reference text for customers or partners who use EMC VNX arrays with vSphere.

VSI Install Guide – Unified Storage Management (vTexan)
Tommy Trogden provides a step-by-step guide to installing the free Unified Storage Management plugin.

How to Use Custom AD Group with ESXi 5 AD Integration (vReality)
vExpert Tomi Hakala outlines how to use user Active Directory for ESXi user authentication in vSphere 4.1.

VMware customers, if you want to see anything specifically highlighted in this blog please respond in the comments section or on Twitter or Facebook. VMware partners and community, please let us know if you have any stories you suggest we highlight in future weeks.

I just read an interesting article on achieving PCI compliance for SMBs (PCI DSS compliance — what does it look like for a small business?)  From my standpoint I see a couple of key takeaways.  The first is that any company that stores, processes or transmits credit card data has some level of compliance responsibility although requirements vary greatly depending on the annual number of transactions.  The second takeaway is that achieving compliance generally requires changes to operations along with some level of incremental investment in both technology and labor.

SMBs have been at the forefront of adopting virtualization.  Often these organizations don’t face the complicated legacy issues that very large companies face.  This combined with the benefit of radically lower technology acquisition costs and the ability to move very quickly has made leveraging virtualization a no brainer for SMBs. A core challenge not addressed in this article but one that is very relevant for SMBs is how to reconcile the need to satisfy PCI related requirements while still being able to fully leverage the benefits of virtualization such as the ability to run mixed mode operations.

The landscape around PCI and virtualization has been pretty muddy.  The new PCI 2.0 standard along with the subsequent virtualization supplement has helped but much is still left to the imagination of both implementers and auditors.  VMware has been working with QSAs such as Coalfire to clarify how to successfully address PCI while still being able to fully leverage virtualization.  This link takes you to a whitepaper written by Coalfire that highlights some of the core technologies that VMware offers that can help you address PCI compliance.  VMware is actively working to deliver more guidance in this area but this will give you a good overview on how VMware can help companies of any size achieve PCI 2.0 compliance.

We (VMware) would love to hear back from you around what you are doing to address PCI requirements in a virtualized environment.  Also check back from time to time to get an update on the work we are doing around ensuring that you can run secure and compliant virtualized environment for PCI as well as other compliance sensitive workloads.

David Jasso
Group Product Marketing Manager, vCenter Configuration Manager

Over the past couple of weeks, the VMware Fusion team has hit the road to meet face to face with VMware Fusion users.  It’s always exciting for us to get the chance to meet more of the VMware Fusion community and to hear about all the cool things our users are doing with VMware Fusion 4.

Mac IT 2012

The Mac IT event takes place during Mac World and is centered on all things Apple in the Enterprise. We are all huge Apple enthusiasts, so it is thrilling to speak to companies and education institutions from all over the world that are deploying Macs in their businesses and schools. The message we heard was clear. VMware is synonymous with stability and reliability in these environments, so naturally VMware Fusion 4 is a perfect fit for businesses that are using Macs and need to ensure maximum compatibility. We are excited to be so closely tied to the journey that Apple is taking into the Enterprise and look forward to continuing to help lead the charge of Macs in the Enterprise.

Apple Advance Camp 2012

The Apple advance camp is an event geared toward Apple Resellers and Apple Consultants. It was an amazing opportunity to share all the new features of VMware Fusion 4, as well as get feedback directly from some of the most knowledgeable Apple Consultants in the country. The response we received was incredible!  Hearing all the amazing stories of VMware Fusion 4 being deployed into everything from high schools to music studios was awesome!  

We truly feel that we have some one of the most loyal and creative user communities out there, and its a real pleasure to get out and speak directly to even just a small portion of you. We look forward to having more chances to meet with many more of you in the near future.

by Neal Mueller

Many Oracle products, including the database, are licensed by physical processor. This licensing model works well in a physical world, in which customers typically run one application per host and physical processors are easy to track. But this model is not well-adapted to a virtual world. VMware vSphere® enables you to consolidate multiple workloads in the form of virtual machines on a single host. Additionally, VMware enables you to move these virtual machines across hosts with VMware vMotion®, VMware Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS) and High Availability (HA). When running products that are licensed by physical processor on vSphere, customers should ensure the following:

• Virtual machines are running on hosts fully licensed for Oracle.
• Virtual machine movement within a cluster is restricted to hosts that are fully licensed for Oracle.
• Virtual machine movements are tracked so that customers are able to demonstrate compliance with Oracle licensing policies.

Many Oracle products are licensed by physical core or socket, and for these products Oracle does not have a virtual CPU-based licensing mechanism. In a vSphere environment, the consequence of Oracle’s licensing policy is that customers must license all physical cores or sockets in the vSphere host (fully licensed host). However, once the host is fully licensed, customers are allowed to run an unlimited number of virtual machines and application instances on that host without additional licenses.

As shown in the below graphic, customers can take advantage of VMware software’s many advanced features, such as Dynamic Resource Scheduler and vSphere HA, to get the highest possible infrastructure utilization and further reduce licensing costs. This this graphic we show consolidation of 16 processors into 4 processors and the resultant licensing savings of 16 licenses to 4 licenses. 

Read our technical white paper on Understanding Oracle Certification, Support and Licensing for VMware Environments to learn more.

Posted by Anne-Marie Clegg
Global Alliance Programs

VMware recently launched the 5.0 version of the VMware vCenter Operations Management™ Suite which represents one of VMware’s 3 management product suites. To get a comprehensive overview of the operations management suite, I recommend reviewing the blogs from our product experts: Martin Klaus and Rob Smoot.

One of the many benefits of VMware’s management suite is that it offers clearer and greater visibility into the entire data center via new dashboards.  To help depict the value of these dashboards, let’s take a look at the data I may want to capture as part of my triathlon training:

1. Health (current state) – Heart rate taking into account variables such as weather, fatigue, etc.
2. Risk (proactive warning) – Am I at risk for an IT band injury and how can I prevent it?
3. Efficiency (resource utilization) – What are my average splits and where am I losing time? (hills, for example)

All of this information is very useful, but what if I had to capture this across all triathlon participants, taking into account the unique variables for each athlete and sport?  I could easily end up with an unmanageable and complex set of data.  IT managers face similar challenges when monitoring the virtual and physical components of their data center.  It gets exponentially more interesting and challenging when virtualizing business critical applications or implementing a private cloud.  VMware addresses this challenge by stitching together data into a single consumable view of health, risk and efficiency “supermetrics” via the new Operations Management dashboard.

3^rd party adaptors/ plug-ins are also available enabling VI Administrators to gain expanded visibility.  To identify partner solutions that are complementary or integrated with VMware’s management suite, take a look at the new VMware Virtual Solution Exchange (VSX).

The end result is less data, more information. Download the free trial version and take a look!

In a recent evaluation of ten of the leading cloud solution vendors (including Microsoft, Red Hat, Amazon, Rackspace and others), the Taneja Group determined that VMware stands out as the clear cloud leader due to its broad portfolio of virtualization and cloud management solutions, service provider ecosystem, and cross-cloud enabling tools and interfaces.

The Hopkinton, MA based Taneja Group are a boutique analyst firm that focuses on the storage industry, storage-related aspects of the server industry, and eDiscovery. Using the VMware-CSC service provider partnership as an example, the Taneja Group highlights what sets VMware’s hybrid cloud service provider program apart:

• A true enterprise hybrid cloud offering
• Fast time to deployment
• Transparent and auditable security
• Dedicated infrastructure
• Multi-tiered enterprise SLAs
• Global consistency and reach
• And finally, our enterprise hybrid cloud expertise.

You can read a detailed blog post about this study on the vCoud blog at blogs.vmware.com/vcloud – that article also includes a link to the full study.

On the Console blog, our CTO Steve Herrod has posted about Cloud Foundry and how it helps you preserve multi-cloud choice and flexibility. He goes into some detail of why companies would want to have multi-cloud setups, such as the ability to grow your platform over time if and when you need it, avoiding vendor lock-in, and meeting different compliance and geographical needs.

Cloud Foundry can deliver this flexibility and the rapid growth of its ecosystem is proof. These days, we have several public cloud providers on board, such as enStratus, Virtacore, and Tier 3, as well as a number of private cloud distributors, including Dell, Canonical, and Scalr.

As many suggest, 2012 will be the year of PaaS, and avoiding vendor lock-in will be a big factor for many businesses. Read more about how Cloud Foundry can help you achieve just that on blogs.vmware.com/console

The London VMUG has announced the winners of the Best Community Presentation Awards for 2011. Our congratulations go out to Stuart Radnidge, Jonathan Medd, and Julian Wood who have all stepped way out of their daily jobs and family commitments to share their experience and know-how with the community. Way to go folks!

Here is our Top 20 KB list for January 2012. 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.

• Methods of upgrading to ESXi 5.0 (2004501)
• Enhanced vMotion Compatibility (EVC) processor support (1003212)
• Manually deleting linked clones or stale virtual desktop entries from VMware View Manager (1008658)
• Virtual machine does not power on because of locked files (10051)
• Troubleshooting VMware High Availability (HA) (1001596)
• Restarting the Management agents on an ESX or ESXi Server (1003490)
• Installing async drivers on ESX/ESXi 4.x (1032936)
• Consolidating snapshots (1007849)
• Using esxtop to identify storage performance issues (1008205)
• Understanding virtual machine snapshots in VMware ESX (1015180)
• Collecting performance snapshots using vm-support (1967)
• Committing snapshots when there are no snapshot entries in the snapshot manager (1002310)
• Best practices for virtual machine snapshots in the VMware environment (1025279)
• Collecting diagnostic information for VMware Fusion (1003894)
• Upgrading to vCenter Server 5.0 best practices (2003866)
• Collecting diagnostic information for VMware ESX/ESXi using the vSphere Client (653)
• Best practices for using and troubleshooting VMware Converter (1004588)
• Unpresenting a LUN containing a datastore from ESX 4.x and ESXi 4.x (1015084)
• Virtual machines stop responding when any LUN on the host is in an all-paths-down (APD) condition (1016626)
• Purging old data from the database used by vCenter Server (1025914)
• Upgrading to ESX 4.1 and vCenter Server 4.1 best practices (1022104)

Are you still excited about SAOP and Rest plug-ins? Another powerful plug-in has already come on the stage! The VMware vCenter Orchestrator SQL plug-in provides fast and straightforward way to perform basic database operations like insert, select, update and delete of table records.

Let's learn more about its core features.

Packaged workflows

The SQL plug-in provides a complete set of workflows that allow you to:

• Perform plug-in configuration
• Generate basic create, read, update and delete record workflows for every table

Plugin-in configuration

The SQL plug-in is configured by "Add/Update/Remove a database" workflows. In order to add a database we need to provide database name, type, connection URL and authentication credentials. We can also choose whether to provide username and password or to use the current vCO user credentials.

After submitting all required information, the new database should appear on the Inventory.

The inventory tree consists of all databases that have been configured so far. Under each database it is possible to see all tables in the default database schema and all table columns. Apart from adding, updating and deleting database configurations we are able to mange the list of tables that we want to see on the database inventory tree manually via "Add tables to database" and "Remove а table from database" workflows.

Generation of basic CRUD workflows for a specified table

Having your database properly configured you are able to generate basic create,read,update and delete workflows for each table. Let's choose the "ip_list" table.

Choose "Generate CRUD workflows for a table" workflow.

Choose Destination directory and columns you will never populate with values (Read-only columns) if any.

The generated work workflows should appear on the workflows view in the "Generated" folder.

Perform database CRUD operations directly

Once we have generated the CRUD workflows for the tables we need, we are able to manage table records as simple as running workflows.

• Creating an "ip_addresses" record

Run the Create active record for 'ip_addresses' workflow and fill in the necessary information.

If we want to be sure that there is no such record in the ip_addresses table the "Validate for record uniqueness" radio button should be selected.

• Reading records from "ip_addresses" table

Run the Read active record for 'ip_addresses' workflow and fill in all fields to search by.

We need to fill in all fields we want to search by. There is also an option to guarantee unique result. If more than one records match the search criteria the workflow execution will fail with exception.

• Updating a record from "ip_addresses" table

Run the Update active record for 'ip_addresses' workflow. First we have to fill in at least one field and then to click on the "Yes" load record button.

If unique result is found, the record values are populated. We can modify some of the values and then to click on the Submit button.

• Deleting "ip_addresses" records

Run the Delete active record for 'ip_addresses' workflow. It will delete all records that match values we fill in the input fields.

All generated workflows could be used in higher level workflows when designing complete business scenarios. It is also possible to go with the plug-in scripting API in order to gain more flexibility needed in some complex use cases.

For additional information on this plug-in and to download it, please visit the following sites:

• VMware vCenter Orchestrator SQL Plug-In: release notes, documentation and download

VMworld Europe 2012 in Barcelona - Pre Registration is open - don´t miss it.....

http://www.vmwareemeablog.com/uk/save-the-date-vmworld-europe-2012-9th-11th-october-barcelona

You're all familiar with the VMware Knowledgebase, but do you know what a Resolution Path KB is?  Well, it's a very special kind of KB article, and we've incorporated Mind Maps into them too, but more on that in a minute.

Resolution Path KBs are collections of modular steps that can be used to solve tech support issues. Being modular, they can be re-used in other resolution paths. A good example is using the ping command to test network connectivity. This step is used in all kinds of troubleshooting procedures. Put a number of these steps together, and you can create sets of very methodical troubleshooting steps.

Mind Maps are a visualization of our Resolution Path KB articles, which help you understand the organization of how it all fits together.

Here are our KBs that are Resolution Paths. You should keep these links close at hand for the products you use. You'll be surprised at how many common issues are covered in these.

1. Troubleshooting ThinApp Issues
2. Troubleshooting Storage Issues
3. vSphere Install Troubleshooting
4. Vsphere Licensing Troubleshooting
5. Resolution Paths for VDR Issues
6. Resolution Paths for VMware Site Recovery Manager Issues
7. Unpresenting LUNs from ESX/ESXi 4.x
8. Resolution Paths for OS Issues
9. Resolution Paths for Converter Issues
10. Resolution Paths for Lab Manager Issues
11. vSphere Troubleshooting Network Issues
12. VMware View Resolution Paths
13. vSphere Troubleshooting Management Issues
14. VMware Update Manager Resolution Paths
15. VMware Fusion Resolution Paths
16. VMware Workstation Resolution Path
17. Fault Resolution Paths
18. Capacity Planner Resolution Paths

If you’ve been contemplating whether to deploy VSA within your IT environment, we have exciting news for you—VSA now supports RAID 5 & 6! Since launching VSA with RAID 10 this past August, we have received customer requests for supporting RAID 5 & 6. Your feedback is always important to us and our engineers have worked hard to deliver this in VSA 1.0.

So what does this mean for you? VSA support for RAID 5 & 6 offers you a greater utilization rate of server hard disk capacity. Using more of your available hard disk capacity means less hard drives to buy... which brings us to the topic of how much it actually costs to deploy VSA in your environment. VSA is licensed on a per-instance basis and can support up to 3 nodes (we leave it up to you to decide whether to deploy on 2 or 3 nodes). Our most popular offering is the Essentials Plus with VSA bundle at $7,995 (which includes VSA at 40% off).

The following chart shows you how VSA can be a cost-effective alternative to the traditional IT approach of deploying a SAN or NAS. In both cases, the customer uses three servers, vSphere Essentials Plus, RAID 5, and has useable disk capacity of 3 TB. VSA does require more hard disk drives for mirroring your data across the servers within your VSA cluster (this allows VSA to be resilient to failures) but there’s no need to install, configure, and manage storage hardware within your environment. 

If you have evolving storage needs and need a shared storage solution to provide high performance and scalability, VSA may not be right for you. For those that are looking to virtualize to achieve business continuity benefits (application availability) and don’t have the resources/capacity to deal with a SAN or NAS, VSA is a great choice. 

Click here to visit our VSA Page

In a recent evaluation of ten of the leading cloud solution vendors (including Microsoft, Red Hat, Amazon, Rackspace and others), the Taneja Group determined that VMware stands out as the clear cloud leader due to its broad portfolio of virtualization and cloud management solutions, service provider ecosystem, and cross-cloud enabling tools and interfaces.

According to the Taneja Group, only VMware offers the combination of industry-leading virtualization and management solutions required for an on-premise, private cloud, as well as the enterprise-class tools needed to bridge the private cloud with one or more off-premise, public clouds – making the successful deployment of hybrid clouds a reality for the enterprise. Check out the following charts to see how VMware’s IaaS and PaaS stacks up against other cloud vendors: 

The Taneja Group also determined that the offerings of VMware’s ecosystem of vCloud service providers surpass the service capabilities of public cloud providers such as Amazon and Rackspace/OpenStack. Using the VMware-CSC service provider partnership as an example, the Taneja Group highlights what sets VMware’s hybrid cloud service provider program apart:

• A true enterprise hybrid cloud offering. In CSC’s case, BizCloud offers the dedicated infrastructure and security of a public cloud with the pay-as-you-go economics and convenience of a public cloud.
• Fast time to deployment.
• Transparent and auditable security – made possible with VMware’s vShield security framework, which is fully virtualization aware.
• Dedicated infrastructure.
• Multi-tiered enterprise SLAs.
• Global consistency and reach. CSC, for example, offers a consistent set of public CloudCompute services from seven CSC Trusted Data Centers on three continents, with plans to expand to 28 data centers in the future.
• Enterprise hybrid cloud expertise. Because the vCloud Datacenter Services program provides rigorous training and certification services and requires service providers to meet enterprise-level standards for security, agility and application portability, certified vCloud Datacenter Service Providers can provide customers with the benefit of their considerable expertise. 

For a breakdown of how VMware’s Service Provider Ecosystem stacks up against Amazon and Rackspace/OpenStack, check out the following chart: 

In sum, if your enterprise is considering a hybrid cloud model, VMware can help make this transition a reality with industry-leading virtualization and cloud solutions and a robust ecosystem of compatible cloud providers. 

For more on the Taneja Group’s findings, download the full report. If your enterprise is interested in the public cloud, you can also apply to test drive a public cloud from a vCloud Provider via vcloud.vmware.com. For future updates, be sure to follow @vCloud and @VMwareSP on Twitter!

Posted by Anne Catambay
Director,Global Outbound
Alliance Marketing

That’s the rating I give to our newly launched VMware® Solution Exchange (VSX).  Why? Because it’s an on-ramp that gives you the opportunity to discover, evaluate and expedite the buying process for virtualization and cloud infrastructure solutions—all in one convenient place.

Want to know what others think about a product that you’d like to try? Use VSX to check out user-generated star ratings and real-world reviews.



Within VSX, you can quickly and easily:
•    Search the entire catalog of joint solutions
•    Explore rich, multimedia content, including YouTube videos
•    Engage directly with partners and developers
•    Purchase the right solutions for your business

VMware has more than 2,000 technology partners. Our partners have built more than 3,500 applications and 6,000 infrastructure products compatible with the VMware portfolio of products. Investigate new solutions or check out information about products that you already use.

Then come back and let me know how you’d rate VSX.

VMware ESX
High disk latency observed on Dell MD3000i storage array (2004576)
Date Published: 1/27/2012
VMware Tools using approximately 15% CPU after upgrading to ESX/ESXi 4.1 Update 2 (2010732)
Date Published: 1/26/2012
Attempting to add a host to the switch fails with an error: “Cannot complete a vnetwork distributed switch operation for one or more host members” (2010965)
Date Published: 1/23/2012
Configuring LSI® WarpDrive™ SLP-300 Acceleration Card and Deploying with VMware® ESX/ESXi 4.1 (Partner Verified and Support) (2012308)
Date Published: 1/24/2012
How to change all paths to FIXED or Round Robin from the command line (2010034)
Date Published: 1/27/2012

VMware ESXi
Adding a USB device to the virtual machine fails with the error: Error connecting to arbitrator socket: No such file or directory (2011947)
Date Published: 1/25/2012
Enabling Jumbo Frames on the Solaris guest operating system (2012445)
Date Published: 1/24/2012
ESXi 5.0 Host Profile Plug-in Support for Dell EqualLogic (2012546)
Date Published: 1/25/2012
VMware Tools installation in non-US-English 32-bit Windows rolls back and fails with MSI error status 1603 (2012665)
Date Published: 1/27/2012
Upgrading ESXi 4.0 may fail on SmartArray P410/i RAID controllers (2008876)
Date Published: 1/23/2012
When binding a vmkernel port to access the iscsi storage we are getting an error on the CLI "Error: Unknown command or namespace swiscsi nic add" (2006047)
Date Published: 1/27/2012

VMware Fusion
Minimizing virtual machines in Fusion 4.1 (2009933)
Date Published: 1/27/2012

VMware Service Manager
Feedback added when rating a Knowledge Base article in Service Manager is not tracked under History (2012251)
Date Published: 1/23/2012

VMware vCenter CapacityIQ
CapacityIQ does not collect datastore information (2007459)
Date Published: 1/25/2012
VMware vCenter CapacityIQ product update (2012306)
Date Published: 1/25/2012

VMware vCenter Operations Enterprise
vCenter Operations Manager 5:0: Scripts for database upgrade integrity check (2010144)
Date Published: 1/25/2012

VMware vCenter Operations Standard
vCenter Operations does not show in vSphere Client after a vCenter Server reinstall (2005004)
Date Published: 1/24/2012

VMware vCenter Server
ESX/ESXi hosts intermittently disconnect and reconnect in vCenter Server (2004457)
Date Published: 1/23/2012
Best practices for joining vCenter Servers in Linked Mode (2005481)
Date Published: 1/26/2012
Determining which user account initiated a task in vCenter Server 4.x (2009075)
Date Published: 1/25/2012
Adding a host to Cisco Nexus 1000v vSphere Distributed Switch fails with the error: Download failed for url: http://<ip_address>/index.xml (2011367)
Date Published: 1/24/2012
Enabling debug logging for the vSphere 5.0 Web Client Server (2011485)
Date Published: 1/24/2012
Upgrading from vCenter Server 4.1 to 5.0 fails with the Error: Exception Thrown while executing SQL script (2011533)
Date Published: 1/25/2012
The vCenter Server Hardware Status tab reports an Unknown status for the power supply of the VMware certified server (2011953)
Date Published: 1/23/2012
Configuring HA fails with the error: Operation Timed out (2011974)
Date Published: 1/25/2012
Host Profile compliance check fails with an error for the Update Manager ruleset (2012027)
Date Published: 1/24/2012
vCenter Server 4.1 Hardware Status tab does not refresh automatically (2004233)
Date Published: 1/23/2012
Performance Chart not working on Windows 7 64-bit with Internet Explorer 9 (2004310)
Date Published: 1/24/2012
vCenter Service Status page alerts: Unable to retrieve health status (2008664)
Date Published: 1/27/2012

VMware vCloud Director
Changes in vCenter Server are not reflected in vCloud Director (2003679)
Date Published: 1/23/2012
When trying to create a vCloud Network Resource in vCloud Director and vShield Edge you receive the error: Cannot create network (2004892)
Date Published: 1/24/2012
Cannot delete a user in vCloud Director with the error: Unable to delete a user who owns vApp Templates or media (2005261)
Date Published: 1/24/2012
Unable to access datastore in vCloud Director 1.0 after resignaturing LUNs (2003600)
Date Published: 1/23/2012
Virtual machine fails to power on in vCloud Director when copied from vCloud Connector using the Deploy in target cloud option (2004017)
Date Published: 1/23/2012

VMware View Manager
Upgrading VMware View Agent to 4.6 or later fails with the error: VMware SCSI Controller driver (vmscsi.sys) failed to install correctly. (2006287)
Date Published: 1/25/2012
A Wyse P20 zero client cannot connect to a Windows 7 desktop in View 5.0 (2008274)
Date Published: 1/24/2012
Persistent and disposable disks are missing after rebooting Windows XP linked clones (2011205)
Date Published: 1/23/2012
View Desktop logon credentials screen takes 60 seconds to appear (2011702)
Date Published: 1/25/2012
Installing View Composer fails with the error: Error 28011. An error occurred during installation of the VMware View Composer database (2011938)
Date Published: 1/23/2012
Users cannot authenticate and connect to a desktop on one domain (1036325)
Date Published: 1/23/2012
Connecting to the View ADAM Database (2012377)
Date Published: 1/23/2012
View Manager dashboard shows one of the Connection Servers as not available (2012292)
Date Published: 1/23/2012

VMware VirtualCenter
Remote console screen of virtual screen is blank (2003854)
Date Published: 1/23/2012

VMware vShield Edge
VMware vShield Edge 1.0 VPN connection fails in Phase 1 (2004066)
Date Published: 1/23/2012

VMware vShield Endpoint
vShield Data Security does not retain hostname settings (2009519)
Date Published: 1/24/2012

VMware vSphere Storage Appliance
VMware vSphere Storage Appliance does not support memory overcommit (2008050)
Date Published: 1/26/2012

Posted by Gina Bollenback,
Global Alliance Marketing
Communications Manager

This week’s roundup highlights events coming up next week and new resources available to make your life easier:

Who to Follow for FlexPod at Cisco Live 2012 London (FlexPod)
If you’re attending or trying to keep up with FlexPod news and events at Cisco Live 2012, this post is for you. NetApp’s Freia Berg highlights the key FlexPod social media resources to follow.

Join Our Next #cloudtalk with VMware Knowledge Experts Chris Colotti and Massimo Re Ferre’ (vCloud Blog)
vCloud Twitter followers believe that security controls will move closer to protected resources in 2012. Do you agree? Join the conversation on January 31st to discuss the continuing evolution of cloud computing.

Voting Now Open for the top VMware and Virtualization Blogs (vSphere-Land)
Eric Seibert has launched his latest effort to identify the top VMware and virtualization blogs. Not only does your vote count, if you’re looking for valuable VMware resources his list is a great starting point.

Introducing Dell on VMware Solution Exchange (Inside Enterprise IT)
Dell’s Kong Yang is proud to announce Dell’s participation in VMware’s Solution Exchange, where customers can search, share, and discover information on Dell’s latest offerings with VMware.

Site Recovery Manager 5.0 Performance and Best Practices (VROOM! Blog)
VMware’s VROOM! Blog announced this week a new technical white paper about SRM’s scalability, recovery, and its performance in real-life workload simulations.

VMware customers, if you want to see anything specifically highlighted in this blog please respond in the comments section or on Twitter or Facebook. VMware partners and community, please let us know if you have any stories you suggest we highlight in future weeks.

By Karl Robinson, Sales Director at StratoGen

Despite the economic gloom on both sides of the Atlantic, 2012 is shaping up to be a bumper year for those involved in the VMware hosting business. Whilst it’s true that most IT managers are under budgetary constraints, the majority have realized that increased use of the cloud will deliver cost savings and bring about an increase in agility and performance. The entire IT industry is moving to delivery ‘as a service’ and the timing of these financial difficulties only serves to focus people’s minds on the benefits of the cloud.

The Rise Of VMware Based Clouds

So where does VMware fit in to this picture? VMware has gained real traction with its service provider program (VSPP) by offering a simple licensing model and a software suite that really delivers. vSphere 5 offers outstanding performance and vCloud Director (which has been updated to v1.5) continues to lead the way as the most powerful tool to manage your virtual infrastructure. But one of the biggest factors driving growth to VMware based platforms is the move away from commodity clouds to enterprise class clouds with defined Service Level Agreements (SLAs).

At StratoGen we’ve experienced this change first hand. In the first half of 2011 a significant percentage of our inquiries were from organizations that wanted to move away from a commodity cloud such as Amazon. But then things changed. Widespread reporting of cloud outages and the increased exposure of IT managers to cloud technologies led clients to realize the importance of VMware based clouds and their associated benefits. This trend has continued and today the majority of our enquiries are from organizations that are already bought-in to the VMware ‘Journey to the Cloud’. Commodity clouds are out of favor, above all because businesses need guaranteed availability. The icing on the cake for clients is vCloud Connector, which offers the unique ability to seamlessly integrate their on-site infrastructure with a VMware based public cloud.

StratoGen Launches US Cloud

Looking forward to 2012 and it’s certainly exciting times here at StratoGen, as we recently announced the launch of our cloud platform in the US. Based out of Denver, our US cloud is built on NetApp, HP and Cisco components and offers the same mix of performance and stability as our award winning European operation.

Feel free to take it for a test drive by signing up for a free 7 day trial here.

About StratoGen          

Karl Robinson is Sales 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.

by Neal Mueller

Not every Oracle support agent got the “memo” that Oracle supports their database and applications being virtualized on VMware vSphere.

Fact is, Oracle has an official support policy for virtualization on VMware vSphere, articulated in MyOracleSupport Document ID #249212.1. The Oracle support policy states that “Oracle will only provide support for issues that either are known to occur on the native OS, or can be demonstrated not to be as a result of running on VMware.” A copy of the Oracle document appears in Figure 1 below.

Figure 1: Oracle Support Policy on VMware

In November 2010, Oracle expanded the above support policy to include Oracle Real Application Clusters (RAC) on vSphere.

For our part, VMware has its own policy to support customers running Oracle applications on VMware. If required, VMware will take ownership of the support request and pursue rapid resolution, in collaboration with the Oracle support organization through TSANet as needed. Because VMware customers virtualize all types of Tier 1 applications, we have significant expertise in making this a seamless support experience.

Read our technical white paper on Understanding Oracle Certification, Support and Licensing for VMware Environments to learn more.

This blog is part of a series on Virtualizing Your Business Critical Applications with VMware. To learn more, including how VMware customers have successfully virtualized SAP, Oracle, Exchange SQL and more, visit vmware.com/go/virtualizeyourapps

Posted by Steve Herrod
Chief Technology Officer

It has been nine months since we launched Cloud Foundry^TM - the industry’s first open platform as a service (aka PaaS).  Cloud Foundry debuted with both the CloudFoundry.com service and as an open source project via CloudFoundry.org and we have seen a rich ecosystem of technology providers and service providers emerge around Cloud Foundry.  Offering a choice of clouds, developer frameworks and application services, Cloud Foundry, currently available in beta, makes it faster and easier to build, deploy and scale applications.

We have made great progress delivering a choice of frameworks and application services to developers and now want to highlight the choice of both public and private clouds Cloud Foundry provides today. 

Multi-Cloud - “Write Once, Cloud Anywhere”

As PaaS gains momentum, there will be more choices of cloud destinations. Some developers might want to keep the entire development and deployment within their organization’s firewall; others may want to build internally and deploy via a hosted service, or vice versa.

As you make choices about cloud technology, one critical factor is whether you have a choice of clouds from which to deploy your applications. Ultimately, what many software developers want is an open PaaS environment with a choice of public, private and hybrid clouds for deployment.

When you build and deploy applications using Cloud Foundry’s open architecture and open source availability you don’t have to worry about being locked into a single cloud.

Why Multi-Cloud flexibility is so important?

• Managing your growth and changing needs over time - whether you want to run on private clouds or public clouds changes over time.  Having the flexibility to add capacity or migrate to another cloud without re-writing your applications it is critical for long term success.
  
  
• Protecting against vendor lock-in – you don’t want to be locked into a single cloud provider. Having the option to move between providers that suit your pricing needs or can offer better quality of service is critical.
  
  
• Meet different compliance and geographical needs – you want to be able to pick and choose where you want to deploy your applications based on compliance requirements, data protection laws, latency constraints and more.
  
  
• Accommodate peak loads – the ability to leverage a choice of public and private clouds to deal with “cloudbursting” scenarios enables you to have the ability to optimize spending.

Cloud Foundry – Making Multi-Cloud a Reality Today

The Cloud Foundry ecosystem is growing quickly with increasing number of technology partners working with us to expand the choice of public cloud providers, private cloud distributions and cloud infrastructures. These partners, combined with simplicity and openness of the Cloud Foundry technology, make the vision of Multi-Cloud a practical reality. 

With Cloud Foundry, moving your application to another cloud is very simple. Simply “target” your new cloud and “push” your application.  No code or configuration changes required.

Looking at the Cloud Foundry command line tool (“vmc”) it looks something like

vmc target api.mynewcloud.com
vmc push myapp

The Cloud Foundry team has a blog post that further describes how Cloud Foundry’s open architecture and tools enables a quick deployment of complex applications across multiple private and public destinations. 

The blog includes a demo showcasing live deployment to five different cloud destinations running Cloud Foundry today without a single code or configuration change to the application.

2012 - The Year of PaaS While Avoiding “Cloud Lock-in”

As many suggest 2012 will be the “year of PaaS”, a critical factor for success is the ability to deploy your PaaS-based application across a choice clouds, developer frameworks and application services. With Cloud Foundry, you don’t have to worry about being locked into a single cloud.

For more information on Cloud Foundry please visit http://www.CloudFoundry.com

VMware Professional Services has helped the Palo Alto Medical Foundation virtualize; leading to controlled datacenter growth, $3+ million in ROI, and improved availability and reliability. Read the Case Study here

 “Application vendors understand that this has become a standard for datacenters and it’s in their best interests if they want to stay competitive to support virtualization.”

— David Maldonado Manager, Server Engineering Palo Alto Medical Foundation

First off, today we released vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.0
This release delivers on the vision of a new approach to virtual and cloud infrastructure management announced at VMworld Copenhagen last October. The VMware  vCenter Operations Management Suite together with vFabric Application Management Suite, and IT Business Management Suite allows our customers to remove the complexity of managing IT across all layers. The three management suites deliver on our mission to simplify and automate IT management in the cloud era and achieve the vision of IT as a Service. Read more on Rethink IT blog.

Also, Last week, Macworld has chosen VMware Fusion for the best way to run Windows on your Mac. And just because they’re so awesome, the Fusion team has announced that they will make the promotional pricing of $49.99 permanent. That is a nice deal for an unlimited personal use license. You can read more on the Fusion Blog.

The VMware Solutions Exchange has opened today, which is a single destination for partners to share their compatible VMware applications and cloud infrastructure products. 

The VMware Solution Exchange (A.K.A. VSX) allows customers to discover, evaluate and expedite the buying process.  You can easily explore VMware partner solutions and developer-provided virtual appliances in a single location, get free trials, watch a demonstration, rate & review, and engage directly with the partner or developer.

For the partners, the VSX will allow to list VMware products or solutions, upload marketing information, and set up free trials through a self-service portal.

All in all, the VSX is awesome for everyone. Go check it out at solutionexchange.vmware.com

Finally, in our previous podcast, we ran a poster giveaway, where our international listeners could win two awesome vSphere and PowerCLI posters. Here are the winners, who have commented on our thread on Google+

• Angelo Luciani from Toronto
• Mourad Boubchir from London
• Andrew Dauncey from Melbourne
• and Mike Preston from Belleville

Congratulations, folks! To claim your posters, send me a message on Plus or DM me on Twitter with your shipping address, and the packages will be on the way!

The majority of business-critical applications such as Web applications, database servers, and enterprise messaging systems have been successfully virtualized, proving the benefits of virtualization for reducing cost and streamlining IT management. However, the adoption of virtualization in the area of latency-sensitive applications has been slow partly due to unsubstantiated performance concerns. By taking VoIP service as an example, a newly published white paper demonstrates that vSphere 5 brings the same virtualization benefits to latency-sensitive applications. In particular, the paper shows that vSphere 5 delivers excellent out-of-the-box performance in terms of voice quality when running VoIP service.

The evaluation results demonstrate that good voice quality is maintained when the number of users (number of voice streams) and media server instance increased, while fully utilizing CPU.  For example, vSphere 5 is able to maintain great VoIP performance even when running 12 instances of VoIP media server configured with a total of 48 vCPUs on a system with 8 cores. It is further shown that the NetIOC feature is able to prevent packet loss successfully, thereby helping to preserve voice quality under severe contention for network.

Read more about the VoIP Performance Evaluation on VMware vSphere 5.

Earlier today, VMware announced the general availability of the new VMware Solution Exchange.  This online marketplace allows customers, partners and developers to easily find and evaluate virtualization and cloud solutions based on VMware software.

For all of us working on vCenter Orchestrator, this launch is a very exciting day... for many different reasons:

1. It now makes it super easy for customers to find all vCO plug-ins in a single location.  As you already know (but we're repeating it anyways), vCO is delivered with vCenter Server and includes several plug-ins (e-mail, SSH, XML, etc.) with the default installation.  But many more plug-ins are released throughout the year and require separate downloading.  With VMware Solution Exchange, you'll be sure of browsing a central list that has the very latest plug-ins.

2. When we say single location, we mean one that includes ALL vCO plug-ins, whether published by VMware or our partners.  As you know, several partners like Infoblox, Radware, or VCE/EMC have recently released plug-ins (with more coming soon).  It will now be significantly easier for all partners to publish their plug-ins and reach the hundreds of thousands of vCenter customers that are entitled to use vCO.

3. Customers can browse through rich, multi-media reference materials such as Youtube video overviews, white papers, user guides, blog postings and much more.  In other words, you'll never be more than a click away from access to more in-depth materials that help you evaluate and use a new vCO plug-in.  And because VMware always encourages feedback from the community, customers will have the ability to rate and provide comments on all listings.

4. Customers can more easily find partners with expertise in the deployment and use of a particular solution.  If you have an urgent project and are looking for a systems integrator or general partner to help you get started, vCO plug-in listings provide links to partners with vCO expertise.

5. Last but not least, we started speaking about VMware Solution Exchange to a few customers and partners many, many months ago... and we're relieved to finally answer "Is it there yet?" with a resounding YES!  ;-)

We hope you share our excitement and happy browsing through the new VMware Solutions Exchange!

Cheers,

The vCO Team

Posted by Jay Workman
Director, HP Alliance
Marketing

VMware and HP Drive Virtualized SAP Landscapes into the Mainstream

With VMware and HP virtualization solutions, your SAP solutions-based development, test, training, and production landscapes can cost less and be more productive than within a purely physical infrastructure. From server consolidation and containment to business process and data center automation, the full range of virtualization benefits can be applied to all sizes of SAP deployments. 

Learn more by registering to attend the Webcast Your SAP Landscape, Virtualized, on January 31 at 8:00 a.m. PST, 11:00 a.m. EST, to understand the benefits of implementing a cost-effective, available, scalable, and secure virtualization platform for your SAP software landscape with HP ProLiant servers based on Intel® Xeon® processors and running VMware vSphere 5.

By attending this Webcast you'll learn:

• How an effective virtualization strategy provides a future-ready scalable landscape
• How to meet and exceed your SAP software landscape performance service-level agreements with virtualization
• How to lower your total cost of ownership while increasing availability, scalability, and security
• How virtualizing SAP software adds little, if any, performance overhead

Experts from Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG) and SAP will discuss SAP's recent announcement about virtualization as well as studies outlining the benefits of virtualizing your SAP software landscape. Register today!

Webcast Sponsored by:

The more we talk to our customers the more we hear that they are focused on two major tasks in 2012. The first is to extend their virtualization footprint by virtualizing more of their business critical applications (e.g., Exchange, CRM, etc.). The second is to accelerate their implementation of a private cloud, and extend it from their dev/test environments into production. For the success of both these initiatives, they recognize that their ability to ensure the performance and health of their virtual infrastructure is critical.

That’s why we’re very pleased to announce the general availability of VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite. This release delivers on the vision of a new approach to virtual and cloud infrastructure management announced at VMworld Copenhagen last October. On main stage we publicly rolled out the largest IT Management launch in our company’s history announcing three new Management Suites:  VMware  vCenter Operations Management Suite, VMware vFabric Application Management Suite, and VMware IT Business Management Suite. These solutions allow our customers to remove the complexity of managing IT not just at the infrastructure layer, where VMware has traditionally focused, but across all layers of IT. Together, the three management suites deliver on our mission to simplify and automate IT management in the cloud era and achieve the vision of IT as a Service.

As our customers virtualize their business critical applications and move to the cloud, the limitations of traditional management approaches are becoming increasingly apparent, as is the need for a new approach.  At VMware, we’re re-thinking infrastructure management. Our approach recognizes that key operations management disciplines—performance, capacity and configuration management—have become inseparable in dynamic virtual and cloud environments. The ability to ensure infrastructure performance and health is impacted by fluidly changing configurations and the sharing of capacity from a myriad of sources. The answer to this challenge isn’t more monitoring – most enterprises have more than enough monitoring solutions. The answer is more intelligence in the form of analytics to make sense of the millions of performance, capacity and configuration metrics these systems generate.

The vCenter Operations Management Suite is built around VMware’s conviction that today’s complex and highly dynamic infrastructures demand an integrated, converged approach to performance, capacity and configuration management. Rather than generating more monitoring data, it collects and analyzes performance data from across the entire IT stack. Its patented analytics correlate abnormalities to generate actionable intelligence that identifies the root cause of building performance problems[m2] .

The vCenter Operations Management Suite builds on many of the unique capabilities introduced with the launch of vCenter Operations 1.0 last year, while delivering a number of new innovations. Chief among these is a new Operations Management dashboard that provides an at-a-glance view of the overall status of your virtual and cloud environments with three “supermetrics”:  health (current behavior and problems); risk (potential for future problems); and efficiency (how well your resources are being utilized).  If there’s a problem, our new smart alerts will give you a pro-active warning, so you can drill all the way down to the individual VM or underlying infrastructure if necessary to resolve it before your end users are impacted.

The vCenter Operations Management Suite is ultimately about providing you with greater visibility to better manage your infrastructure and the applications that run on it.  For example, we’ve significantly extended the integration of configuration and capacity management. You can now see change events that occur inside your VMs, not just at the host level. And you can model your capacity to see its impact on future performance. With this greater visibility you can better maintain compliance and eliminate sprawl and configuration drift, while increasing your resource utilization efficiency. Today’s release also includes a new application discovery and dependency capability that provides application-awareness for users of vCenter Operations Management Suite to help with impact analysis, disaster recovery planning and datacenter and application migration projects.

If you, like so many of our other customers, are thinking about virtualizing one or more of your most critical business applications, or if you’re ready to make the move to the cloud, I encourage you to learn more about the vCenter Operations Management Suite.  A great place to start is today’s blog posting by Martin Klaus, Senior Product Marketing Manager for vCenter Operations, which provides a more detailed overview of the Suite’s new features and capabilities.

At VMworld Europe last October we announced three new suites for operations management, application management and IT business management. Together, these three management suites deliver on our vision to simplify and automate IT management in the cloud era. Check out this video of VMware CTO Steve Herrod introducing our new virtualization and cloud management portfolio on main stage at Copenhagen. Now that the vCenter Operations Management Suite is generally available, let’s take a closer look at some of the new capabilities.

Automated Operations Management

With vCenter Operations 5.0 we’ve greatly enhanced some of the concepts and analytics introduced in vCenter Operations earlier this year. The new suite improves on the existing functionality and delivers several new capabilities including:

• Operations Management dashboard with smart alerts in all editions
• Fully integrated performance, capacity and configuration management
• Application discovery and dependency mapping
• New editions targeted at SMB and enterprise customers.

If you’re used to managing vSphere performance with esxtop or the vSphere client, you might be asking, why you should look at vCenter Operations? The reality is that more and more monitoring data is collected in a virtual environment. For example, vSphere 5 introduces about 130 new performance metrics greatly expanding the breadth of the datacenter fabric (storage, network, etc.)  that vSphere is managing.  At the scale of several hundred VMs, you can quickly see that operations management is becoming a “big data” problem if you stay focused on individual metrics -- what metrics should you look at, are there some metrics more important than others, what is the range of values and what thresholds should you set to alert about a performance problem, etc.?

In reality, not one or a few select metrics are more important than others. We need to look at managing the environment holistically and take advantage of the rich data and intelligence that the vSphere platform provides. This is why we introduced new “supermetrics” to better describe workload, health, risk and efficiency of individual VMs, hosts, clusters or entire datacenters. The key point here is that all metrics must be analyzed as performance is determined in context of CPU, memory, network and storage demands.

More importantly, we also need to measure how these metrics change over time and build up a knowledge base of learned behavior so we can determine whether the numbers we’re seeing right now are within an expected range or if they deviate above or below normal. This is what we call dynamic thresholds that adjust automatically with the behavior of the environment. Our intent is to completely eliminate the need for setting and managing static thresholds that either lead to false alarms or don’t fire when they should. Dynamic thresholds are proven to lead to fewer, but more actionable alerts.

There is a lot more to be said about the analytics in vCenter Operations than what I can cover in this post, but here is a brief summary of some of the new super metrics introduced in VC Ops 5:

• Health describes the current behavior of the environment and any problems that need to be addressed immediately. Health is composed of workload, anomalies and faults.  Workload is a measure of how hard the VM is working relative to the resources it wants and what it is entitled to using. Anomalies is an expression of the number of metrics trending above or below normal which is a leading indicator of upcoming performance problems, and faults is the number of “hard” thresholds that have been crossed when there is an availability issue or a hardware failure has occurred.
• Risk describes the potential for future problems. Risk combines scores for time and capacity remaining before resources are exhausted. Risk also includes a new metric for stress which shows patterns of chronic strain. For example, during certain times of the week, there is more demand for resources in one cluster while other clusters are at or below capacity. You can use this information to optimize VM placement or to pre-allocated resources ahead of time.
• Efficiency is a new super metric to describe optimal utilization of resources. Efficiency includes scores of reclaimable waste, such as idle, over- and under-provisioned VMs, and VM density.  VM density shows current consolidation ratio vs maximum possible ratio without performance degradation.

These super metrics are readily available in the operations management dashboard of the suite. Drill-downs allow you to quickly zoom into individual clusters or hosts or zoom out to get a datacenter-level view that might span multiple instances of vCenter Server. Moreover, we’ve added smart alerts with automated root cause analysis in all editions so you can proactively manage (and avoid) performance problems building in the environment.

Speaking of root cause analysis, we often hear from VI admins that 9 out of 10 performance problems are change related. In vCenter Operations 1.0 we already introduced the ability to correlate vSphere change events with performance and health metrics. In VC Ops 5 we introduce the ability to also show change events that occur inside the VM, such as registry changes, patches and applications that users may have been installed. This data is supplied by vCenter Configuration Manager (VCM) which a lot of organizations are already using for configuration and compliance management. Integrating configuration data with performance metrics give you a more holistic view of the environment which will help reduce finger pointing and improve relationships with storage engineers, and DBA’s.

To give you an idea of how this works in a real world scenario, I’ve included a video of vCenter Operations managing the hands-on labs (HOL) at VMworld 2011. The proactive alerts generated from vCenter Operations allowed our HOL team to detect and resolve a building storage problem before it started to impact lab attendees resulting in a flawless performance of what happened to become our biggest and most successful VMworld lab to date.

Better visibility into application components and services running on virtual infrastructure will help improve your ability to manage the environment. This is where vCenter Infrastructure Navigator (VIN) comes in which provides application-awareness for users of vCenter Operations. It discovers application components, automatically names them and provides version numbers and maps out visually where these components are running and how they’re communicating with one another. Use case for VIN include impact analysis, disaster recovery planning and datacenter and application migration projects. With VIN, you can easily find VMs and see visually how they communicate and relate to other VMs within the context of an application. Check out this video to see Infrastructure Navigator in action.

Overall, the vCenter Operations Management Suite has been very well received by our customers and the new 5.0 release is another big step forward in simplifying and automating operations management. Again, the new version is available now and you can download a 60-day free trial. Existing customers can upgrade to the new version free of charge. We’re very proud of what we’ve accomplished with this release but, of course, it’s what you think that’s important.  So please send us your feedback and your questions.

VMware Solution Exchange (VSX) Enables Customers to Discover, Evaluate and Expedite Buying Process for Joint Solutions through Direct Engagement with Partners and Developers. This are important news for vCenter Orchestrator. Here is what these involve:

• vSphere customers will now find all the vCenter Orchestrator plug-ins in a single location. vCenter Orchestrator is bundled with some plug-ins but VMware and partners have provided several additional ones. The solution exchange will feature the latest version of all VMware and all VMware partners vCenter Orchestrator plug-ins.

• For VMware partners it will be significantly easier to publish their plug-ins to make them available to the hundreds of thousands VMware vSphere Customers that are entitled to use vCenter Orchestrator.

• The VMware Solution eXchange improves the customer experience with providing rich, multi-media content, white papers, user guides, blog postings and search tools allowing to engage with partners and developers to help ease the process of finding the right solution for their businesses.

• The VMware Solution eXchange provides customers with the opportunity to use a five-star rating system and provide a written review about their experience with the solution.

For more information:

• Visit the VMware Solution Exchange home page.
• Visit the vCenter Orchestrator section.
• Read the official press release.
  
• The VMware vCenter Orchestrator blog
  
• Twitter hashtag #VMwareVSX