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Oracle DBAs considering to virtualize Oracle 11gr2 RAC should check out VMware vSphere 5 platform - VMware® vSphere® is the industry-leading virtualization platform for building cloud infrastructures. It enables users to run business-critical applications like Oracle with confidence and respond to business needs faster by taking advantage on the application and Infrastructure services that vSphere 5 provides.

As you all know, Oracle now provides support (Oracle MySupport ID: 249212.1 – RAC support added as of Nov 8, 2010) for Oracle 11gr2 RAC on VMware. VMware vSphere® 5.0 can handle the intensive workloads of business-critical applications - Let us discuss on a workload characterization study that was conducted on a four node Oracle 11g R2 RAC using VMware vSphere 5 with Cisco UCS servers and EMC VNX5500 Unified storage. See below the architecture that describes and demonstrates how the Oracle RAC deployment can sustain a heavy OLTP load without any degradation to transaction performance.

Below table describes the various components involved in this workload study.

Let us see below the few test result highlights described in this workload characterization study:

• 24 hour workload Test: The following table summarizes results for 24 hour workload test. The above architecture was tested by subjecting it to a sustained heavy OLTP workload over a 24-hour period and results showed substantial transaction throughput without any degradation in performance.

  

• Oracle RAC Node VM vMotion Test: The following SwingBench load generator screenshot shows the results during first and second vMotion. This also shows there is a minimal TPM impact during vMotion and ramps back to where it was before the vMotion, each vMotion took approx 64 seconds.

For more detailed read, check out the Oracle Databases on VMware vSphere® 5 - RAC Workload Characterization Study click on the image below

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 www.vmware.com/go/virtualizeyourapps

VMware Partner Exchange, also known as PEX was the big news last week, with more than 4,300 partners, employees, press, and industry analysts (including representatives from CRN, eWEEK, Gartner, IDC and TechTarget) getting together in fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. Over the course of four days, attendees had access to over 190 unique breakout sessions, 20+ hands-on labs, and 91 sponsors and exhibitors who were present in the Solutions Exchange. As usual, there were plentiful networking opportunities at lunches, dinners, receptions, and other special events.

To help its partners grow and differentiate themselves, VMware has developed a number of special programs, incentives, and enablement tools which were introduced at PEX:

• Three new solution competencies: Virtualization of Business Critical Applications (VBCA, available today), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS, available today), Management (available later in Q1)
• New specialization for the SMB vertical
• Lucrative advantage+ and Solution Rewards optimizations
• Launch of the VMware Solution Exchange
• New Consulting and Integration Partner Program (CIPP)

Also last week, we’ve made available vCloud Director client for iPad. Designed for the consumer of a vCloud Director environment, this app provides the ability to manage your cloud with your fingertips.

Some key features of the app include:

• Ability to create new vApps
• Through the use of a third party app, you can access the VMs within your vApp via RDP, VNC, or SSH.  Note:  The supported 3rd party apps are:
  • For SSH: iSSH and Remoter
  • For RDP: Jump Desktop and Remoter
  • For VNC: Mocha VNC, Screens, and Remoter
  • It also provides the ability to perform common tasks, such as powering on a VM.
  • And of course all settings can be visualized and modified

You can read the details and watch a demonstration video on the vSpere blog at blogs.vmware.com/vsphere

And exactly week ago, at PEX we have opened the vExpert applications for the year 2012. As you know, vExpert titles are given out each year to the most excellent of VMware enthusiasts out there, those who go above and beyond their daily jobs to share their experience and expertise with others. This frequently takes the form of blogs and books, public speaking, podcasts, and video, help on VMTN and other forums, as well as creation of free tools for the community to use.

This year we’ve had a change in the program, to allow people who do their work away from the limelight of the internet, such as our customers and partners, to be able to apply as well. So this year applicants have the choice of applying in one of three categories: Evangelist, Customer, or VPN Partner.

Because contributions of people applying in the Customer and Partner paths are frequently non-public, we require an internal reference from a VMware employee to verify just how awesome the individual’s contributions were.

You can apply yourself, or invite an awesome colleague of yours to apply, at vmware.com/go/vexpert2012

One of the top concerns that we consistently see plaguing SMB IT decision-makers centers on finding ways to better protect business processes and assets. According to Gartner, 40% of companies that suffer a business interruption fail within 5 years.

If you’re currently using VMware’s vSphere Essentials Plus Kit, one way to better protect your business is to upgrade to VMware’s vSphere Enterprise Acceleration Kit, which includes vCenter Server Standard and 6 CPUs of vSphere Enterprise. From now until June 15^th, 2012, we’re running a promotion that takes 30% off the regular upgrade price, saving you more than $4,500. With vSphere Enterprise Acceleration Kit, you can ensure that your business production apps always get the computing power they need, even at the highest consolidation ratios (get more from your existing hardware using DRS!).

Protect your business with Enterprise Acceleration Kit, which keeps your business running through server failures with uninterrupted application availability (see our Fault Tolerance feature) and put an end to planned downtime for server or storage maintenance (read more on vMotion and Storage vMotion).

To upgrade today, click here.

Suggestions, questions, or more concerns that we can help out with?  Make sure to leave us a note. 

-Julia Lee, Product Marketing Manager, VMware

I had the pleasure of attending the VMware Partner Exchange this year. I delivered a deep dive presentation on VMware's Storage Appliance (the pdf can be found here), as well as an overview of the features going into the next version of the VSA. I can't discuss these features with you just yet, but rest assured I will be doing a number of posts on the new features as soon as I have permission to do so.

Like other conferences that I get invited to, I always try to take a look around the Solutions Exchange and see what cool things are going on in the storage space. This post simply discusses some of the new and interesting products/features that I've seen from our partners at PEX. It is no way all-encompassing, as I didn't get to see everyone. Hopefully you'll find it interesting all the same.

Disclaimer - Once again, (I am sure that you are fed up with me repeating this message at this stage) the vSphere storage blog has to remain storage vendor neutral to retain any credibility. VMware doesn't favour any one storage partner over another. I'm not personally endorsing any of these vendor's products either. What I'm posting here is what I learnt about the products and features at the sessions & something which I hope you find interesting too.

My first stop off was to the Atlantis Computing stand to find out more about their new VDI Performance Accelerator product called ILIO. I'm taking a bit of poetic license by including it in 'storage', but it addresses an area that is of concern right now in the VDI space. This is a product that VDI folks have been getting very excited about. I spoke to Joshua Petty, Director of Systems Engineering at Atlantis. He told me that the ILIO software appliance (virtual machine), which sits in the I/O path between your hypervisor and storage, will increase your VDI performance 10 fold, allowing up to 4-7 times more desktops per host.The ILIO also does inline deduplication, reducing storage capacity for each desktop by up to 99%. This is all very impressive. Since the appliance sits in the I/O path, it presents an iSCSI or NFS datastore at the front-end to the hypervisor, and at the backend, it is presented with NFS, iSCSI or Fibre Channel storage from the storage array.The appliance then sits in the middle, doing its dedupe & acceleration bit.

The one concern I did have is what happens to I/O in flight should this appliance fail. It would appear that Atlantis offer the ILIO in both fault tolerant and high availability configurations. They can also create a synchronous FT cluster of Atlantis ILIO virtual machines on separate physical hosts. There certainly seems to be a lot of interest brewing in this technology. More here at http://www.atlantiscomputing.com/products/


During this trip, I also managed to meet up with Martin Lister, who heads up the Rapid Desktop Program at VMware. I did a previous post about this program where I describe how Pivot3 on boarded very quickly, and appeared to have gained a lot of traction as a result of their participation in this program. It was great to again meet with Lee, Olivier, Mike and the rest of the Pivot3 guys at PEX and hear how well things are going for them in the VDI space.

Martin also told me that a number of other VMware storage partners are readying themselves to certify very soon in this program. Certified partners then get listed in the VMware HCL under the category VMware View POC Solutions.

Note however that the program is not directed at storage vendors, but is aimed at solution providers. The partner becomes the one-stop-shop for a complete VDI solution that has been fully tested & then certified by VMware. This includes the hypervisor, storage & VDI. The RDP certified partner will have to follow strict criteria for ease of roll-out/deployment of the VDI solution, as well as provide a solution that can host a defined number of View desktops. Pivot3 also did a presentation at PEX around their VDI solution which was very well received. Unfortunately I missed it myself, but I've since heard that there was a lot of interest in their solution.

I'm hoping to do a follow up post shortly detailing some of the new partners that are certifying on this program. Its definitely going from strenght to strength.

My final update is around a new partner called Starboard Storage Systems. These were the new kids on the block at PEX 2012, and after chatting with Tony Lagera, one of Starboard's Regional Sales Managers, it would appear that these guys have just recently come out of stealth mode. It looks like their play is to make the management of mixed workload environments much simpler, and allow a vSphere admin who may not have in-depth storage knowledge to easily manage their storage infrastructure on a per application basis. If I understood correctly, their array implements tiering to achieve this - what Starboard are calling their Mixed-workload, Application-Crafted Storage Tiering (MAST) architecture. This replaces a RAID configuration found in traditional arrays. Starboard state that this reduces a lot of complexity involved in setting up the correct type of storage for your application. Their AC72 storage system also comes with an SSD tier for improved performance, and supports connectivity across multiple storage protocols including NFS, iSCSI, and Fibre Channel.

Not sure about VAAI support, or if there is a vCenter plugin for management at this time. I'll have to keep an eye out for these guys at future conferences. More about them here - http://www.starboardstorage.com/

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

Posted by
Luc Dekens
PowerCLI Community Member

Introduction

The VMTN PowerCLI Community is a vast repository of PowerCLI scripts and snippets. At the time of writing this post, there were nearly 5000 threads and more than 80 documents posted.

With so many threads present, it happens quite often that users ask a question that was already answered in a different thread. The problem is that most users of the PowerCLI Community don’t really know how to search the threads and documents. Admittedly, the search functionality offered in the VMTN communities is not the easiest and most intuitive one to use. Hence this post that should give you a couple of pointers on how to use the PowerCLI Community as (very) big repository of PowerCLI goodies.

Starting a search

On any page of the community you will see a search box near the top right corner of your browser page.

Let’s type some text, for example ‘svmotion’ in the search field. The forum software will now automatically open a drop-down box with some first results.

You have 3 options to continue.

1. By clicking the magnifying glass or the ‘View All Results’ text, the Search page will open. From there you can select one of the displayed threads or documents, or you can further refine your search.

2. The results that are displayed in the drop-down box do not come from the PowerCLI Community alone. They are entries found throughout all the Communities in the VMTN forum. By clicking on the ‘Only for VMware vSphere ™ PowerCLI’ hyperlink at the top of the drop-down box, the contents of the drop-down box will change. It will contain only entries coming from the PowerCLI Community.

If you now click on the ‘View All Results’ hyperlink, you will be taken to the Search page, similar to the first option. But the Search page will only contain entries from the PowerCLI Community.

Note that clicking the magnifying glass you will be taken to the Search page, but the results will come from all VMTN communities!

You can go back to the results from all the VMTN communities by clicking the ‘All’ hyperlink at the top of the drop-down box.

3. If you see in the list a post whose title suggests that it might contain what you are looking for, you can click on that line. The selected thread will open.

The Search page

This is the page where you have a plethora of options at your disposal to refine your search.

1.  Add words to refine your selection criteria.

On the ‘Search Tips’ you can find many ways to fine-tune your search. A short extract of the more important search rules:

• When you enter multiple words, the search will look for threads and documents that contain all of the words.
• When 1 or both of the words should appear in the thread or document, use OR between the words. For example: ‘svmotion OR vmotion’
• Put the logical operators in Caps to distinguish them from your search keywords.
• When looking for an exact sequence of words, place them in double quotes. For example: ‘”background job”’
• Use the fuzzy search (~) when you are not 100% sure of the word(s) you’re looking for. For example: ‘motion~’’
• Use a weight (^n) on specific words to make them more important in your search. For example: ‘svmotion^2 vmx’. This will make the presence of ‘svmotion’ twice as important as the presence of ‘vmx’.
• Indicate in which part of the post (subject, body, tags or attachmentsText) you want to search for a word. For example: ‘subject:svmotion’
• Specify words that should not be in the results. For example: ‘svmotion NOT vmx’
• Use parenthesis to create complex search strings. For example: ‘svmotion AND (vmdk OR vmx)’

2.  Under ‘More options’ you can limit your search to a specific Community or a specific person. When you want to select a specific Community, type part of the Community name and select one of the Communities that is proposed.

Note that you will have to start with ‘vsphere’ to get to the PowerCLI Community !

The search will now be limited to the PowerCLI Community.

3. When the search returns a number of hits, you can order the results by Date, Subject or Relevance.

The options Subject and Date are self-explanatory. The Relevance option is a percentage given by the Jive search algorithm to the search results, indicating how much a specific search result corresponds with the search query.

The best results, according to the search algorithm, will appear at the top of the list.

4. With the ‘What’ options you can filter the results based on where they are found. In the PowerCLI Community the only usable options are All, Discussions or Documents. The Blog Posts and Links do not seem to be used in the PowerCLI Community.

The options correspond with the Tabs you see on the PowerCLI Community page.

5. The ‘When’ option allows you to specify in which period in the time you want to search. You can select Anytime, the past Day, Week, Month or Year.

Since the oldest threads in the PowerCLI Community date from December 2007, this can be a handy option to limit the search results to those that correspond with the actual PowerCLI version.

Remember that there are on average 2 new PowerCLI versions per year, and that each of these brings a bunch of new Cmdlets and sometimes even complete snapins. So a valid answer from 2008 is not necessarily the best answer for the latest PowerCLI version !

Some practical examples

With the knowledge from the previous section, you should now be able to perform very precise searches and get useful results. Since I’m a strong believer in the “learn by example” principle, I added a couple of practical examples in this section that will hopefully help you getting started.

Know the defaults of the Search

Remember that the Search engine by default will use AND if you enter multiple keywords.

Use OR when you want results that contain one or the other of the keywords to be present in the results.

Instead of doing ‘vmx tools copy paste’ use ‘vmx AND tools OR copy OR paste’.

Don’t use only general keywords

Try to avoid using general search terms that will produce hundreds of results.

Don’t search for ‘PowerCLI vm report’, instead use one or more specific keywords ‘vm report numcpu’. In this example the addition of the numcpu keyword will get you more specific results.

Try to use very specific keywords

This is perhaps a stupid advice, but one that could save you a lot of time.

Suppose you are looking for a thread that discusses deploying a VM from a template and that includes information on customizing the NIC of the guest.

Your first thought could be to type ‘deploy vm template nic customise’, this returned 27 threads.

If you know that you can use the Set-OSCustomizationNicMapping cmdlet for this, add the cmdlet in the keywords. That returned only 1 thread.

Use the VMware vSphere PowerCLI Overview

In the previous example the addition of the Set-OSCustomizationNicMapping keyword to the search, gave us a better search result. But how do you know that cmdlet exists if you are new to PowerCLI or had never used the cmdlet before.

In the VMware vSphere PowerCLI Overview you can use the search functionality to help you discover the Cmdlets. In this example when you for example type the word ‘nic’, the reference will return a number Cmdlets, including the Set-OSCustomizationNicMapping cmdlet.

Note that you also search for Types, Parameters and Enumerations.

Use the More and Filter Options

Do not only use keywords. Sometimes it is useful to add 1 of the More options to fine-tune your search.

For example, searching for ‘vcheck’ (the famous reporting script) will return 34 results. By adding the name of the user who posted or replied, you can limit the number of results. The same query, but with the addition of the Restrict to a specific person option, will return only 3 results.

If you want to find results that are more likely to discuss the most recent version of the vCheck script, use the When option.

This produced 3 results that all referenced vCheck v6.

Let Bookmarks help you

I don’t know if this already happened to you, but I often find a useful or interesting thread that I can’t find back after a couple of days. To avoid this use the Bookmark feature to add such a thread to your list of threads that you want to keep for later consultation.

You can find the Bookmark option on the right side under the Actions,

click it and optionally enter some notes to go with the bookmark. Note that you make your bookmarks public or private.

You can consult your Bookmarks through the My Bookmarks entry in your user accounts drop-down menu.

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..

 Lakshmana Prakash
ThinApp Packaging Consultant
ThinApp Community: Lakshman
lprakash@vmware.com
 
 
Problem:
 
During initial launch of the ThinApp EXE, a new sandbox is created, which holds the runtime 
modification of the application. After an uninstall of the ThinApp software the sandbox is not 
deleted. 

• Undesired behavior of the application when interacting with the old settings of sandbox
• Cannot revert the ThinApp back to its original state

Limitation:
 
At present, the Package.ini configuration settings are to remove the sandbox on exit. Deleting 
the sandbox during ThinApp MSI uninstall process is currently not supported.
Solution:
 
The deletion of the sandbox can be accomplished by modifying the ThinApp MSI along with the 
help of vbscript. 
 
1.  Edit the template.msi (under %programfiles%\VMware\VMware ThinApp) using any
MSI editor tools, preferably Orca (freeware from Microsoft).
 
2.  Write a vbscript (DeleteSB.vbs) to delete the sandbox folder from %appdata%\Thinstall.
A simple VBscript code is below which removes the sandbox „WildEdit‟. 
 
Const SandboxFolder = " WildEdit "
Dim strComputer, oWMI, oWSH, oFSO, AppdataFolder, ThinstallFolder, FolderToDelete
 
strComputer = "."
Set oWMI    = GetObject("winmgmts:\\" & strComputer & "\root\cimv2")
set oWSH    = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
Set oFSO    = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
AppdataFolder = oWSH.ExpandEnvironmentStrings("%appdata%")
Set ThinstallFolder = oFSO.GetFolder(AppdataFolder& "\Thinstall")
FolderToDelete = ThinstallFolder & "\" & SandboxFolder
 
if oFSO.FolderExists(FolderToDelete) then
oFSO.DeleteFolder(FolderToDelete)
End if

3.  Add a new row in Binary table with the below details: 
 

This will add the vbscript to the MSI as a binary data. 
 
 


 
4.  Add a new row in CustomAction table with the below details:  
 

 

 
 
5.  Add a new row in InstallExecuteSequence table with the below details:  
 

 

 
6.  Run the build.bat. The generated ThinApp MSI is now capable of deleting the sandbox
during the uninstall process. 
 
 
 Conclusion: 

• To delete the sandbox only during installation process, add the condition “Not
  Installed”
• To delete the sandbox during both installation and the uninstall process, leave the
  condition  as blank

White Paper on
ThinApp Conditional Install

Lakshmana Prakash
ThinApp Packaging Consultant
ThinApp Community: Lakshman
lprakash@vmware.com

Problem:

In general, there are many applications that might have been designed to work in a specific environment. Typical environments consist of the following:

1. Operating System Version (e.g. Windows 7 or Windows XP)
2. Operating system Service Packs (e.g. Windows XP SP3 or Windows Vista SP1)
3. Operating System Type (e.g Windows XP 32 bit or Windows 7 64 bit)

When capturing those applications, it is necessary to make sure that the ThinApp is
installed for that specific environment, by checking the system.

Limitation:

At present, a ThinApp MSI can be installed on any Windows Operating system, irrespective of
its configuration. There is no direct way to install the MSI conditionally.

Solution:

The best way to overcome this limitation is to restrict the ThinApp MSI to install only on the
specific platform. The following detail the required steps to configure the restriction:

1. Edit the template.msi (under %programfiles%\VMware\VMware ThinApp) using any MSI editor tools, preferably Orca (freeware from Microsoft).

2. Add a new table “LaunchCondition” with the required condition and a description.

• To install only on a Windows 7 desktop, add the condition “VersionNT=601” and an appropriate description. This description will be shown to the end user if condition is not met when running the MSI

•  To install only on a Windows XP desktop updated to Service Pack 3 or above, add the condition “VersionNT=501 AND ServicePackLevel>=3”

• To install only on 32 bit Operating systems, add the condition “Not VersionNT64”

For complete list of operating system and VersionNT property value, please visit http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa370556(v=vs.85).aspx.

3. Add a new action “LaunchConditions” to the existing “InstallExecuteSequence” table with the required condition and Sequence number.

• Add the condition “Not Installed” with the Sequence number as “410”.

4. Build your ThinApp by running “Build.bat” file under project folder.

5. The generated MSI under “bin” folder will have the changes reflected.

NOTE: The changes made to template.msi will be applied to all ThinApp MSI(s) generated
thereafter. You need to revert back the changes to template.msi after generating the ThinApp MSI for that particular application.

Conclusion:

Installing the MSI on “unsupported” platform shall exit with a warning message as below:

• For VersionNT=601

• For VersionNT=501 And ServicePackLevel>=3

• For Not VersionNT64

So what exactly is VMUG? VMUG (the VMware User Group) is an independent, customer-led organization working to maximize our members’ use of VMware and partner solutions.

VMUG is made up of people like you – in fact more than 75,000 people like you belong to VMUG. Our members come from around the world, from a variety of industries and companies (small to medium to big to self-employed), with a variety of experiences.

So how does VMUG bring all these different people from all these around the world together? We’re able to bring our members together in a number of ways, including:

•  Local VMUG groups: We have 180+ local VMUG groups around the world, each hosting multiple face-to-face meetings throughout the year. In fact, we’re probably coming to your neighborhood soon – you can take a look here.

• Educational webcasts: We are broadcasting live, informative webcasts throughout the year that you can participate in right from your desk

• User Conferences: We are holding 30 full-day, multi-track conferences around the world. Check here to see if we’re coming to your city this year

• VMUG Voice: Our monthly e-newsletter delivering the latest news and announcements from VMware, the industry, and the VMUG organization directly to your inbox

• VMUG Advantage: An exclusive, members-only opportunity to save on training, certification, VMworld registration, and more here

The best part? VMUG membership is free! All you have to do is register here and you can start taking advantage of all VMUG has to offer.

Stay in touch: 

Twitter

Facebook

We look forward to working with you!

Frannie Garvey, Communities Manager, VMUG"

By: David Davis

After attending VMware Partner Exchange 2010 and 2011, I can tell you that PEX 2012 has been the best show so far. In case you missed them, check out my summaries of PEX Day 1 and PEX Day 2. On Day 3 of PEX, the excitement in the air continued with another great general session, Partner Award announcements, great sessions, labs, vExpert meetings, and the Partner Appreciation Party. Here’s my report on each of them, as well as the show overall.

The day started off with the second general session. VMware’s Carl Eschenbach, Co-President of Customer Operations started off by talking about why you should “Double Down with VMware in the Cloud Era”. Carl said that customers are embracing next-generation Cloud technologies and that VMware and its partners are capturing and expanding their global revenue opportunities. He covered VMware go-to-market strategy and how VMware partners are a part of it. Carl said that by joining forces with partners, huge wins can be made in “the cloud era”.

Next up, William Taylor, Founding Editor of Fast Company magazine, gave an inspiring speech about transforming your company and challenging yourself in business. He said that we are living in the age of disruption. Inspiring case studies like those from Southwest Airlines and Umpqua Bank were offered up as examples of how businesses can be transformed. William said that the only way to stand out from the crowd is to stand for something special.

After the general session, I headed to the PEX labs to continue my labs on VMware vCloud Director. I enjoyed the short line, good performance, and scenario-based labs that helped me to understand how to create hybrid clouds with vCloud Director.

I also attended sessions like those from John Arrasjid, VCDX #001, about the vCloud Architecture Toolkit (vCAT) and sessions like Disaster Recovery in VMware vCloud Director by Duncan Epping and Chris Colotti. After the session, Duncan and Chris posted a blog and a video about their solution for vCloud Director. See the video below: 

That evening was the Partner Appreciation Party. VMware SVP Scott Aronson gave a rousing introduction for the BareNaked Ladies. My favorite part was when they played the theme song to “The Big Bang Theory," which they wrote. 

While at PEX, I also posted a blog and video vChat from the show. You can find them here:

• Thank you for vExpert Program and Gifts
• vChat #24 – Live from PEX 2012

Overall, the show was the best Partner Exchange yet! VMware touted how they are the leader in virtualization and cloud as well as how partners have the opportunity to capitalize on that. Through labs and sessions, I updated my education on VMware cloud, and through the Solutions Exchange, my eyes were opened to all of the new solutions for the VMware cloud.

If you missed the show, make sure that you plan to attend next year!

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.

By Tisa Murdock, Product Line Manager, End User Computing

We recently announced a new VMware reference design called VMware AlwaysOn Point of Care™ solution. This new solution is built to handle the last mile of Electronic Medical Record (EMR) delivery by providing constant availability to patient care applications. As healthcare providers continue the migration from paper to digitized records, Healthcare IT is under tremendous pressure to deliver extreme levels of availability to these applications from a variety of end point devices. This solution not only addresses the availability issue but also protects patient data with strong yet lightweight security – security that does not affect mobility.

Learn more about this solution this week in Las Vegas at HIMSS12. VMware will be showcasing our Point of Care solutions built to solve today’s real world Healthcare IT challenges. Hear a short presentation from Bill Hudson, CISA – Corporate Director, Information Technology at Kettering Health Network (KHN) Tuesday, February 22 at the VMware Booth #3862. Learn how his talented team was able to implement this solution using HP Converged Infrastructure at KHN and how they continue to innovate by recently introduced iPad tablets for doctors to access their Epic EMR for supreme mobility. Look for an announcement around this and more info in the next few weeks – KHN is rockin’ it!

Bill will also be conducting an education session at HIMSS12 on Friday, February 24 at 11:15AM -12:15AM in Casanova #503 titled “Data: Take it or Leave it”. In this session he focuses on how KHN, a multi-hospital network addresses the needs of clinicians, compliance and IT when implementing an enterprise-wide clinical data retention program. Not to be missed!

Make sure you stop by the VMware booth # Booth 3862, MP25 at the Sands Expo Hall February 20 – 24 and see all of the VMware Healthcare demos and learn how we are transforming the cost, quality and delivery of patient care. 

By William Lam, Sr. Technical Marketing Engineer

• Introduction to the vSphere API Part 1: Overview

In Part 1 of the series, we provided an overview to the vSphere API. In this article, we will explore the vSphere Object Model.

Overview

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 is a server side object
• Managed Object Reference is a client reference to a Managed Object
• Data Object contains information about a Managed Object and can also be used to transfer data between a client and server

Though a Managed Object is the common base type, it can be extended to represent other types of objects and we will see this in an example below.

The vSphere Object Model is complex due to the extensive amount of functionality it provides. To help you visualize the objects and relationships, here is a UML diagram for the vSphere 5 Object Model. The object relationships can be inferred by using the vSphere API Reference. Coloring has been added to highlight some of the important objects, which will be explained later.

Note: The diagram was modified from Steve Jin’s original post here and updated to reflect the vSphere 5 API. This was a great idea by Steve to create visualization for the vSphere API Object Model.

Managed Object

A vCenter Server or an ESX(i) host is composed of many different components such as configurations (objects highlighted in green are configuration related to an ESX(i) host), administrative/management services (objects highlighted in blue) or entities in its inventory (highlighted in orange are entities such as a cluster or virtual machine) to just name a few. These components are generically refereed to as a Managed Object and reside on the server itself. Each Managed Object has a defined type to distinguish them from one another and has an associated set of properties and operations. This provides the information needed to interact with one of these objects whether that is presented through the vSphere Client UI or using one of the vSphere SDKs.

Let’s take a look at an example of a Managed Object, a Datastore:

If we look at the vSphere API reference for a vSphere Datastore, we will see it has some properties defined on the object such as summary which provides a summary information about the datastore or host which provides a reference to all ESX(i) hosts that is attached to this datastore. There are also a set of operations associated with a datastore such as DatastoreEnterMaintenanceMode which is one of the new features in vSphere 5 that allows a user to enter a datastore into maintenance mode.

We can see from the diagram that a Datastore is also a Managed Entity type which in turn is a ExtensibleManagedObject and finally a Managed Object (highlighted in yellow). This concept is a known as as inheritance in OOP (Object Oriented Programming) as a way to share/re-use code for similar objects. Another example of this is the new StoragePod object in vSphere 5, also known as a Datastore Cluster in the vSphere Client UI. From the diagram above, we can see it extends the Folder object and as documented in the vSphere API, it has it’s own unique properties and operations. The StoragePod also inherits from it’s parent object’s attributes as a way to re-use similar properties that are applicable.   

The objects that extend the Managed Entity (highlighted in orange) are the most important Managed Objects to the vSphere inventory as well as the ServiceInstance which is an entry point to a vCenter Server or ESX(i) host (highlighted in red). We will dive into these topics further in the next article.

Managed Object Reference

To interact or modify an entity such as a virtual machine or ESX(i) host, a client application like the vSphere Client or one of the vSphere SDK’s needs to be able to reference a Managed Object from the server side, as you can not access the server side objects directly. This reference encapsulates the properties and operations of the Managed Object and it makes available to the client application. This reference is always guaranteed to be unique and persistent for the lifetime of the object within vSphere.

Data Object

As you perform an operation or modifications to a Managed Object, you are transferring data between the client application which can be the vSphere Client UI or one of the vSphere SDK’s. This data that contains properties and operations of a Managed Object is called a Data Object. The data types for the property of a Data Object can be another Managed Object, a simple string, an integer or an enumeration (enum). An enumeration is just a predefined set of values such as the state of a virtual machine will always be poweredOn,poweredOff, or suspend. A Managed Object Reference is also special type of Data Object that represents a Managed Object residing on server side.

Here is a diagram of of a client application interacting with either a vSphere vCenter Server or an ESX(i) host. We can see the client has a Managed Object Reference of a virtual machine and it uses Data Objects as a way to transfer the state changes between the client and server.

Though the vSphere Object Model is complex in nature, hopefully after this you will have a better understanding of how they are represented and how to access their properties and operations within vSphere. In the next article, we will take a look at the vSphere Inventory Hierarchy and how these Managed Objects are organized.

References:

• The vSphere Web Services SDK Programming Guide
• Object Model of VMware vSphere API: A Big Picture in 2 Minutes
• ManagedObjectReference vs ManagedObject

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

Apache Active MQ
What does "Memory percent used" mean on the ActiveMQ jmx/web monitoring tool? (2005511)
Date Published: 2/15/2012
NullPointerException encountered on KahadDB causes broker not to be started (2006077)
Date Published: 2/15/2012

Apache HTTP Server
Using the AllowProxyPASV option with the FTP module in Apache HTTP Server, Enterprise Ready Server, or vFabric Web Server (2010349)
Date Published: 2/17/2012

Apache Tomcat
Performance tuning tips for Tomcat (2013486)
Date Published: 2/13/2012

Socialcast On Premise
Excluding users from LDAP, so that they are not removed automatically from the Socialcast community (2012004)
Date Published: 2/14/2012

Spring Framework
How to use both annotated MVC controllers and IoC XML defined controllers together (2007264)
Date Published: 2/15/2012

VMware Data Recovery
Required permissions for VMware Data Recovery restore operations (2008157)
Date Published: 2/16/2012

VMware ESX
vMotion of a VMware vFabric GemFire CacheServer fails (2008773)
Date Published: 2/17/2012
VMware Tools power-on script fails to run successfully (2010481)
Date Published: 2/14/2012

VMware ESXi
After installing the be2net driver 4.0.355.1, VMNICs are missing on the ESXi host (2010222)
Date Published: 2/14/2012
Converter Standalone 5.0 errors when an ESXi 5.0 host is selected as a destination: The access to the host resource settings is restricted. Use the management server as a destination (2012310)
Date Published: 2/17/2012
Scripted installation of ESXi 5.x using a kickstart file from a USB device with a loop partition is unsupported (2013663)
Date Published: 2/13/2012
A vMotioned virtual machine loses network connectivity and reports the error: Error deleting free dvport ad a0 19 50 ab 83 c4 bd-15 35 ec b7 92 8e f8 b8-359 (2009252)
Date Published: 2/16/2012
ESX/ESXi host displays warning message when test condition is false (2008602)
Date Published: 2/15/2012
Cannot disable lockdown mode in the DCUI after a host disconnects from vCenter Server (2008851)
Date Published: 2/14/2012
vCenter Server Inventory service unable to retrieve health data (2007724)
Date Published: 2/17/2012

VMware Fusion
Shutting down the Windows virtual machine fails with the error: Errors occurred while Windows was synchronizing your data (2013413)
Date Published: 2/13/2012
The Windows 7 virtual machine fails to connect to the Internet/network and reports the error: Unidentified Network (2013496)
Date Published: 2/13/2012
Backing up a virtual machine using Time Machine in Fusion 4.x (2010527)
Date Published: 2/16/2012

VMware Player
Installing a new virtual machine in VMware Player (2013483)
Date Published: 2/16/2012

VMware Service Manager
Non-English characters in Service Manager Knowledge Base articles generate errors in Application Event Viewer (2011098)
Date Published: 2/15/2012
Adding Thresholds to Inventory CIs in Service Manager causes the wrapper to freeze on Windows XP client machines (2013430)
Date Published: 2/13/2012
Adding Thresholds to inventory items in Service Manager fails with the error: Please complete highlighted QD fields (2013432)
Date Published: 2/13/2012
RV_CUSTOMER view does not display the correct customer location (2013464)
Date Published: 2/14/2012
The Customer, Call\Customer, and Call\Call\Customer references point to the same recipient (2013470)
Date Published: 2/15/2012
Data transferred from the Service Manager connector for vCenter Orchestrator is incorrect (2013621)
Date Published: 2/15/2012
Running the custom SQL script Config Portability GUID Assignment.scp against an Oracle database results in an error (2013694)
Date Published: 2/15/2012
Attachments in the Service Manager email disappear from the Attachment field (2010637)
Date Published: 2/14/2012
A Service Manager Threshold Notification email is triggered when creating thresholds even when the On-Hand quantity is zero (2013431)
Date Published: 2/13/2012
A knowledge search in VMware Service Manager does not show the message Retrieving Results (2013451)
Date Published: 2/14/2012
Customer Portal does not show complete text in the description field (2013454)
Date Published: 2/14/2012
Breaching monitor displays escalation levels instead of breaches (2013458)
Date Published: 2/14/2012
A date value of February 29 2012 is not saved in the VMware Service Manager customer portal (2013829)
Date Published: 2/17/2012

VMware vCenter Configuration Manager
Clicking the Supercedes or Vendor Attributes ellipsis in the vCM Unix Bulletins slider reports a SELECT permission was denied error (2009360)
Date Published: 2/17/2012
Running a cronjob to assess and download patches to the SCR fails with the error: java.lang.ClassNotFoundException (2009846)
Date Published: 2/17/2012
Cannot collect UNIX data types via SSH on ESX hosts in vCenter Configuration Manager (2013584)
Date Published: 2/15/2012
Deploying Adobe Flash Player updates via vCenter Configuration Manager fails (2013640)
Date Published: 2/15/2012
VM Hosts or VM Guests collections in vCM succeed, but the collection is empty (2008556)
Date Published: 2/17/2012
vCenter Configuration Manager HTTP traffic is denied to Linux systems (2010200)
Date Published: 2/15/2012

VMware vCenter Operations Manager (vApp)
Collecting diagnostic information for VMware vCenter Operations 5.0 vApp (2013647)
Date Published: 2/16/2012
Cannot deploy vCenter Operations 5.0 Standard/Advanced vApp in a vSphere Essentials/Essentials Plus environment (2013695)
Date Published: 2/16/2012

VMware vCenter Operations Standard
Cannot log in to the vCenter Operations UI after importing LDAP accounts (2013440)
Date Published: 2/16/2012

VMware vCenter Orchestrator
Expanding an existing virtual disk fails with in vCloud Director: Invalid hard disk parameters specified (2013342)
Date Published: 2/15/2012

VMware vCenter Protect Essentials Plus
Manually downloading threat definitions for VMware vCenter Protect (2013911)
Date Published: 2/17/2012

VMware vCenter Server
vCenter Server 5.0 installation fails with an error stating that the FQDN of the server cannot be resolved (2007523)
Date Published: 2/16/2012
vSphere Web Services SDK WSDL files obtained directly from vCenter Server are not complete (2010507)
Date Published: 2/13/2012
Installing vSphere Support Tools fail with the error: The application does not support IP link-local addresses (2012279)
Date Published: 2/14/2012
Initiating a Storage VMotion in vCenter Server 5.0 in Linked Mode produces an error  (2013516)
Date Published: 2/16/2012
Host Profile creation fails with error: Unrecognized Fixed PSP configured path (2013531)
Date Published: 2/14/2012
Host shows the vSphere HA status as Network Partitioned (2012649)
Date Published: 2/14/2012

VMware vCenter Server Appliance
After joining the Virtual Center Server Appliance to a domain you cannot see domain when adding user permissions (2011965)
Date Published: 2/13/2012
Replacing the default SSL certificates for VMware vCenter Server Appliance (2013352)
Date Published: 2/17/2012

VMware vCenter Update Manager
Remeditation or staging fails in Update Manager with error: error codes: 7 (2011656)
Date Published: 2/15/2012

VMware vFabric Enterprise Ready Server
Enabling FTP support in vFabric Enterprise Ready Server (2010348)
Date Published: 2/17/2012
Converting SSL certificates from iPlanet Web Server to PEM format for Apache HTTP Server (2010521)
Date Published: 2/16/2012
Specifying JVM startup options for vFabric Enterprise Ready Server (2013503)
Date Published: 2/13/2012

VMware vFabric tc Server
Building and using the latest version of Tomcat High Concurrency JDBC Datasource (2010112)
Date Published: 2/17/2012
Deleting or rotating the wrapper.log file in vFabric tc Server (2010299)
Date Published: 2/17/2012
Libraries required when setting the java.awt.headless system property for use with Apache Tomcat (2010240)
Date Published: 2/17/2012
Tomcat application context is not reloaded when the Web application/JSP page/servlet is updated (2010358)
Date Published: 2/17/2012

VMware View Manager
View desktop customization fails with the error: View Composer agent initialization error (13) more than one persistent disk has the same usage (2013459)
Date Published: 2/14/2012
Logging in to the View desktop takes a long time when persona management is enabled (2011823)
Date Published: 2/14/2012

VMware Workstation
Workstation fails to bridge adapter with error: Cannot change network to bridged: There are no un-bridged host network adapters (2005168)
Date Published: 2/13/2012

ZCS Network Edition
Enforcing a match between the FROM Address and sasl_username in Zimbra Collaboration Server (2011281)
Date Published: 2/14/2012

ZCS Open Source Edition
Zimbra service fails to start with error: 97: Address family not supported by protocol (2007887)
Date Published: 2/14/2012

A short while back, I wrote a post on RDMs, and their behaviour when involved in migrations. I had someone reach out to me about this post, and highlight another behaviour which I missed in the previous blog posting. First, one needs to understand the settings for a pRDM when it is attached to the VM. Looking at the entries in the VM's vmx file, this is what we see:

scsi0:0.present = "true"
scsi0:0.fileName = "COR-XP-PRO-2_1.vmdk"
scsi0:0.mode = "independent-persistent"
scsi0:0.deviceType = "scsi-hardDisk"

The interesting part here is that the pRDM is independent persistent. This means that the RDM is excluded from Virtual Machine snapshots. Now when this RDM is converted to a VMDK (via a Cold Migration as mentioned in the previous post), the VMDK also inherits these independent-persistent characteristics, as shown here:

I'm highlighting this as an interesting fact to keep in mind after the migration. This VMDK may not behave as one might expect when snapshots are taken of this Virtual Machine, which could also have ramifications for backup products which snapshot virtual machines before backing them up (it could be that this VMDK is excluded from the backup).

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

Three important vCO plug-ins have seen their first update release recently. These plug-ins are: AMQP plug-in HTTP-REST plug-in SOAP plug-in Most of the work done for those updates comes from the feedback collected from the users, through both our public communities and our Socialcast group.

And these are the main new features included within the update releases:

AMQP plug-in

• SSL support has been added for RabbitMQ brokers.
• The current API has been extended with delete and unsubscribe operations.
• Other minor improvements and bug fixes.

See https://www.vmware.com/support/orchestrator/doc/amqp-plugin-101-release-notes.html

HTTP-REST plug-in

• NTLM authentication support has been added to the existing BASIC and DIGEST.
• Other minor improvements and bug fixes.

See https://www.vmware.com/support/orchestrator/doc/rest-plugin-101-release-notes.html

SOAP plug-in

• NTLM authentication support has been added to the existing BASIC and DIGEST.
• SSL support has been extended to the WSDL file download and parsing process.
• A flexible SOAP request/response interception mechanism has been added and it’s available from scripting.
• SOAP element attributes defined inside the WSDL file now are also available from the workflow presentations, both when invoking SOAP operations directly or when generating a workflow from them.
• Access to root request/response element attributes has been enabled.
• Other minor improvements and bug fixes.

See https://www.vmware.com/support/orchestrator/doc/soap-plugin-101-release-notes.html

Enjoy the new releases and don’t hesitate to provide your valuable feedback!

The SNMP plug-in allows vCenter Orchestrator to connect and receive information from SNMP enabled systems and devices.

These devices could include communication equipment (routers, switches, etc.), network printers, UPS devices and many others. Events from vCenter can also be received over the SNMP protocol.

The SNMP plug-in provides two different manners of communication with the SNMP devices – queries for the values of specific SNMP variables and listening for events (SNMP traps) that are generated from the devices and pushed to the registered SNMP managers.

Inventory

The SNMP plug-in adds inventory objects to vCO, that consist of a trap host and a set of SNMP devices.

The trap host node represents vCO listening for SNMP traps. It holds the basic configuration of vCO, acting as SNMP manager. It can be either online or offline, which is configurable with workflows.

The list of devices that follow the trap host holds configuration information that is needed for the access to these devices.

Each device can have a set of specific queries, which can be started, in order to obtain data from the device.

Device management

The list of SNMP devices is managed by the workflows in the Device Management section of the vCO workflow library.

They reflect the whole lifecycle of an SNMP device:

1. Register an SNMP device

With this workflow SNMP devices can be added to the vCO inventory. Device address is the most important parameter of the workflow. All the others are optional or have default values. It can be either IP address or DNS name, although using IP address is recommended, because SNMP is often used as diagnostic and problem-alerting protocol, and the dependency on DNS decreases it’s level of reliablity.

The name parameter is used to define user-friendly name. If skipped, the device address is used to generate a name autmatically.

By default, devices are registered for SNMP v2c version, on port 161, with community name “public”. In advanced mode these settings can be changed.

Supported versions are v1, v2c and v3. The support for v3 is limited to AuthPriv security level, with MD5 authentication and privacy with DES pass-phrase same as the MD5 password.

2. Edit an SNMP device

The “Edit an SNMP device” workflow allows to change the properties of an already registered SNMP device. It has the same fields as the “Register an SNMP device” workflow, with the exclusion of the advanced mode radio button.

3. Unregister an SNMP device

This is a very simple workflow with only one field – a chooser of the device to unregister. When a device is unregistered, all the queries attached to it are lost.

Query management

Each device can have a list of queries attached to it.

They hold settings of object identifiers, query types, etc. They can be used as building blocks in more complex workflows.

1. Add a query to an SNMP device

This workflow creates an SNMP query and attaches it to an SNMP device in the vCO inventory.

The allowed types are GET, GETNEXT and GETBULK. OID is the object identifier of the variable that we want to query. Only numeric OIDs are supported, with the single exception of OIDs that start with “iso”.

Examples of supported types of OIDs are: “1.3.6.1.2.1.1.5.0”, “.1.3.6.1.2.1.1.5.0”, “iso.3.6.1.2.1.1.5.0”.

If the name parameter is skipped, a name is automatically generated, using the type and the OID, like “GET 1.3.6.1.2.1.1.5.0”.

2. Copy an SNMP query

This is a convenient workflow, that allows to copy existing queries between registered devices.

3. Edit an SNMP query

This workflow allows to modify existing SNMP queries. It has the same parameters as the “Add a query to an SNMP device” workflow.

4. Remove a query from an SNMP device

This is a single parameter workflow, that allows to delete queries that are no longer necessary.

5. Run an SNMP query

With this workflow, an SNMP query can be run. The result is retrieved as an array of properties in the following format (which is also logged to the vCO system log):
Element 1:

=============

oid: 1.3.6.1.2.1.1.5.0

type: String

snmp type: Octet String

value: myhostname

The type of the result is a high-grain selection between String, Number and Array. More specific type can be retrieved from the snmpType property, where the original type of the result is stored.
If more detailed result information is needed, any custom workflow may run queries in the same manner as “Run an SNMP query” and work directly with the returned SnmpResult object, which has the following structure:

Trap host management

These workflows handle how vCO is listening for SNMP Traps.

1. Set the SNMP trap port

This workflow stops the trap host, sets the new port and then starts the trap host. It is important to note that the default port for SNMP traps is 162, but in Linux systems, it is not possible to open ports bellow 1024, without super user permissions. That’s why the default port for listening to SNMP traps in the SNMP plug-in is 4000. It can be changed to other one with this workflow, if 4000 is unavailable, or 162 is accessible.

2. Start the trap host

Parameterless workflow, that starts the trap host.
3. Stop the trap host

Parameterless workflow that stops the trap host.

Generic SNMP request workflows

They perform the basic SNMP requests, without the need to create a specific query.

1. Get SNMP value

Performs basic SNMP GET request, with the provided object identifier.

2. Get next SNMP value

Very common to the “Get SNMP value”, this workflows performs SNMP GETNEXT request.

3. Get bulk SNMP values

Performs SNMP GETBULK query. Specific for this workflow is the “Number of results” field, which specifies how many result elements will be retrieved in one GETBULK request. The default is 10.

SNMP traps

There are two ways to receive SNMP traps in the SNMP plug-in. With workflow, which is waiting for a single trap message, or with policy, which can handle traps continuously.

1. Wait for a trap on an SNMP device

This workflow features a trigger, which stops the execution of the workflow and waits for an SNMP trap to continue. When such a trap is received, the workflow is resumed. It can be used as part of more complex workflows, or as a sample that can be customized or extended for a specific need. The OID field identifies either the Enterprise OID of the trap, or any variable OID. If no OID is provided, the workflow resumes after receiving any trap from the specified SNMP device. Otherwise, it is waiting for a trap with the provided OID.

2. SNMP trap policy

A policy can be used if it is necessary to continuously listen for traps from an SNMP device. For that purpose, the “SNMP Trap” policy template must be applied. After this, a policy with the specified name appears in the Policies group. To start listening for traps, this policy must also be started. If necessary, it’s “Startup” option may be edited, to allow starting the policy on server startup.

Then a specific workflow or scripting code may be associated with this policy for integration in a more complex scenario.

SNMP traps can be sent to other systems with the “Send an SNMP trap” workflow.

The manager address and port fields point to the receiving system. If the port field is left empty, it will be substituted to 162.

The enterprise OID is not mandatory. It identifies the type of the device that is sending the trap.

Type can be String, Number or Array. String values are sent as SNMP Octet String. Number values are sent as Gauge32. And the Array values are sent as multiple variable binding traps of Octet String SNMP type. Array values are represented as comma-separated list of oid:value pairs in the Value field of the workflow.

by Tom Stephens, Senior Technical Marketing Architect, VMware (Twitter: @vCloud_Storm)

If you have tried to integrate a VMware vCenter Chargeback Manager installation with the vCloud Director Appliance  you likely ran into some issues.  The main reason for this was the configuration of the Oracle XE embedded database that is bundled with the vCloud Director Appliance. 

If you find yourself in a position where you want to evaluate VMware Chargeback with the vCloud Director Appliance, I’d suggest you go read this KB article.  This article shows you how to make the required changes to the listener.ora file for the embedded database so you can successfully integrate the two. 

If you haven’t checked out using Chargeback with vCloud Director, now might be a good time to do so.  It’s great in multi-tenancy environments or if you just want to generate quick reports to show resource consumption.

Besuchen Sie unsere brandneue Seite https://solutionexchange.vmware.com/store um auf VMware zertifizierte Lösungen/Produkte von Drittherstellern zu finden.Es werden laufend neue Anbieter und Lösungen hinzugefügt.

By Duncan Epping, Principal Architect, VMware.

Technical Marketing Update 2012 - Week 07:

This week most of us attended VMware Partner Exchange and presented various sessions. I must say that PEX was a great event and I heard a lot of good stories about the sessions and labs. Well organized by the PEX team and I hope I will be able to attend again next year. The list of articles a bit smaller than normally due to PEX, but nevertheless worth posting. We will be back to full speed again next week...

Blog posts:

• vCloud Director infrastructure resiliency solution (Duncan Epping) http://bit.ly/y43yxC
• Automating Auto Expand Configuration for a dvPortgroup in vSphere 5 (William Lam) http://bit.ly/wMgQUc
• How to get started with the vCloud SDKs in less than 5mins (William Lam) http://bit.ly/w6B07s
• vCloud Director Client for iPad now available! (Tom Stephens) http://bit.ly/wLuOz3
• interview with … (Duncan Epping) http://bit.ly/xWbd1X
• My Partner Exchange 2012 Storage Picks #VMwarePEX (Cormac Hogan) http://bit.ly/yOPNhY
• iSCSI Advanced Settings (Cormac Hogan) http://bit.ly/yUiUfa
• Using F5 to balance load between your vCloud Director cells (Duncan Epping) http://bit.ly/wMvm73
• vSphere Replication - Not protecting a single VMDK in a multidisk VM (Ken Werneburg) http://bit.ly/xjJ5yB
• Ruby vSphere Console (RVC) 1.6 Released (William Lam) http://bit.ly/zdGDzb
• Performing A Storage vMotion in vCloud Director Using vCloud REST API (William Lam) http://bit.ly/y5bds5

Many of you have probably had a communities post answered by LucD… I know I have!

He it the most active PowerCLI member and one of the most respected vExperts and PowerShell/PowerCLI users in the community.  Luc has presented at many VMworld sessions and VMUGS alike, he has a great blog with some great posts here: Lucd.info

For those of you wanting to learn PowerCLI and not knowing where to start idera recently announced he will be performing a session on PowerCLI first steps.

This is highly recommended for both beginners and experts alike.

Details

Wednesday, March 28, 2012

12:00 – 01:00 PM Central Time

Register here: https://www.vconferenceonline.com/event/regeventweb.aspx?id=560

Are you looking for a quick and easy way to deploy a small vFabric environment for your Java apps in just a few clicks – without the need to troubleshoot?

Tier 3, a VMware vCloud-powered service provider, has announced access to its Starter Kit Blueprint for VMware vFabric, which comes with four virtual machine instances and advanced vFabric application services. Each of the servers is configured with four gigabytes of memory and two virtual CPUs (vCPUs) by default, but users can change the configuration easily in the Tier 3 Control Portal after deployment.
Tier 3’s vFabric Starter Kit comes with:

• vFabric tc Server
• vFabric GemFire®
• vFabric Web Server
• vFabric Hyperic®

Deployment is very easy and can be done in four easy steps:

1. Logon to the Tier 3 Control Portal and go to Blueprints > Search for “vFabric Starter Kit”
2. Click on the vFabric Starter Kit Blueprint and on the next screen click Deploy Blueprint.
3. Next you will want to customize your blueprint by specifying a server password, name of network to place the servers on, and primary and secondary DNS.
4. Last step is to deploy the customized vFabric Starter Kit blueprint by clicking on the Deploy Blueprint button at the bottom of the screen.

The platform will now do all the orchestration and deploy a fully working vFabric environment for you. To access the environment all you have to do is logon via VPN (Tier 3 has instructions here).

For a full overview of an install with vFabric Starter Blueprint, watch a video demo taking you from deployment to configuration with Tier 3 product manager Shantu Roy.

Getting started

Getting started is simple. Go to Tier 3 and activate your account, which will give you access to this Blueprint.

Network I/O latency is an important measurement, especially in latency-sensitive applications like those found in industries such as finance and trading, healthcare, transportation, and telecom (in particular, applications using Voice over IP). The end-to-end latency requirements of these applications vary from microseconds to milliseconds. And some of these applications, such as those utilizing Voice over IP, are more sensitive to jitter than end-to-end latency. So an important measurement to consider for vSphere performance in this scope is latency and jitter added due to virtualization.

vSphere performance testing in a recently published white paper shows that there is minimal network I/O latency due to virtualization overhead. The paper looks at several aspects of network I/O latency, including:

• Latency overhead due to virtualization per VM per round-trip
• Round-trip latency between two virtual machines on the same vSphere host
• Impact of using DirectPath I/O on virtual machine response time
• Impact of resource (CPU, network bandwidth) contention on virtual machine response time

The paper also includes consolidation guidelines and best practices that can reduce network I/O latency in your vSphere system.

Read more about Network I/O Latency on VMware vSphere 5.

Posted by Gina Bollenback
Global Alliance Marketing
Communications Manager

In today’s edition of News Around the Network, we’ve got details about new integrated partner solutions, evolving vCloud management tools, and more blog posts from around our Alliance network:

Accelerating Customer and Partner Success with VXI and VMware View (Cisco Data Center Blog)
Cisco and VMware’s partnership continues to blossom, with Cisco now offering VMware View 5 as a streamlined part of its VXI solutions.

vCloud Client for iPad (Cloud-Buddy)
If you haven’t heard the news, vCloud client is now available for the iPad – so you can manage your vCD environment right from your tablet!

vExpert 2012 Applications Now Open (VMTN Blog)
Are you an active and enthusiastic VMware user? Apply to be 2012 vExpert and you could help us spread knowledge and expertise about VMware technology.

VMware and Mitel Bring Desktop Virtualization to the Contact Center
This week VMware and Mitel announced an integration of Mitel's Unified Contact Center Solution and Unified Communicator Advanced client software with VMware View, which allows customers to deliver modern virtual desktops and applications to end users as a managed service from the data center or the cloud.

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've had a few questions recently about some of the iSCSI configuration parameters found in the Advanced Settings.

When iSCSI establishes a session between initiator and target, it has to login to the target. It will try to login for a period of LoginTimeout. If that exceeds, the login fails.

When iSCSI finishes a session between initiator and target, it has to logout of the target. It will try to logout for a period of LogoutTimeout. If that exceeds, the logout fails.

The other options relate to how we determine a DEAD PATH:

1. RecoveryTimeout is used to determine how long we should wait before placing a path into a DEAD_STATE when the path was active, but now no PDUs are being sent or received. Realistically it’s a bit longer than that, as other considerations are taken into account as well.
2. The noop settings are used to determine if a path is dead, when it is not the active path. iSCSI  will passively discover if this path is dead by using the noop timeout. This test is carried out on non-active paths every NoopInterval, and if a response isn’t received by NoopTimeout, the path is marked as DEAD.

Unless you wanted faster failover times, you probably wouldn't ever need to edit these. But be careful because if you have paths failing too quickly and then recovering, you could have LUNs/devices moving unnecessarily between array controller targets which could lead to path thrashing.

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

Hosts
John Troyer

Guests
Keith Norbie
Tony Foster - @wonder_nerd
Stephen Foskett - @sfoskett

Link to Audio Recording
Live from VMware Partner Exchange!

Virtualization News
It Starts Here - VMware Partner Exchange (PEX) 2012
Atos, EMC and VMware to form an open cloud computing strategic alliance
VMware and Mitel Bring Desktop Virtualization to the Contact Center
Virtualization Field Day 2 – Silicon Valley
PEX 2012 Day 1 Recap
PEX 2012 Day 2 Recap

Show
General Discussion about PEX

Reflections on the tone at PEX - calm & competent - confident energy

4000 people attending PEX

People are moving toward automation and scaling it up

SQL/Exchange bootcamps - best practice takeaways were awesome

Virtualization of Teir1 apps have increased over the past year Going virtual gives you better tools to see

What is going on with your Teir1 apps

Success Key to get DBAs on side - its how you present it to them 

VCA Certification for a small bussiness would be great

VMware GO - great for SMBs - Try it now

Virtualization for Small and Midsize Business

vExpert 2012 applications now open

New Pathways for vExpert 2012 - Evangelist Path - Customer Path - VPN (VMware Partner Network) Path

Additonal Links

VMware has become aware of an issue when staging or remediation of patches on ESX/ESXi hosts fails.

Update Manager 4.1 Update 2 contained a security fix that made the Update Manager webserver case-sensitive. The issue occurs when trying to access any patches or VIBs that were downloaded prior to upgrading to Update Manager 4.1 Update 2. The VIB files downloaded via Update Manager from the production patch portal all have lowercase names, while the metadata lists them with mixed-case names.

For details on this issue, please refer to the Knowledgebase article: Remediation or staging fails in Update Manager 4.1 with the error: error codes: 7 (2011656).

By Tisa Murdock, Product Line Manager, End User Computing

Well I am just finishing up a week at VMware Partner Exchange in Las Vegas and am getting ready for another action packed week in Las Vegas at HIMSS12.

For those not familiar with HIMSS – it is the largest Healthcare IT conference and event of the year. They are expecting over 30,000 attendees this year. This will be the 5th year that VMware has exhibited and this year we have built an awesome demo area featuring VMware Point of Care solutions.

We will be showcasing VMware View displaying clinical images in 3D and patient care applications using Apple iPads, Samsung Galaxy TABs Tablets, MacBooks, new Wyse thin client laptops and Zero clients. Our partners Teradici will also be joining us in the booth and will be displaying a huge 55 inch touch screen with 3D medical images – this is going to be really cool! Using VMware View with lossless PCoIP technology and desktop virtualization to remotely deliver clinical images is gaining traction in the healthcare market. Check out the newest venture we recently announced with Peake Healthcare Innovations.  Cloud based delivery of medical images to any device will enable physicians to quickly make decisions, be more collaborative and ultimately provide better patient care – this is truly game changing!

Teradici will be demoing the new Zero Clients with Imprivata strong authentication and single sign on using proximity cards. This efficient workflow is really helping clinicians with super fast access to patient care applications by simply tapping a card.

We also will be showcasing VMware Horizon Mobile, VMware ThinApp and Cerner Instant Access solution and VMware Private Cloud solutions.

We will be in booth # Booth 3862, MP25 at the Sands Expo Hall February 20 – 24. Hope to see you there!

It is this time of the year again, and the applications are now open for the vExpert 2012 selection.

In the years past, the program has attracted the most enthusiastic and active VMware users to become vExperts and help us spread knowledge and expertise about VMware technology. vExperts got access to software licenses, betas, and early access programs, as well as exclusive events at VMworld in Las Vegas and Copenhagen.

What’s next? Of course, more of the same. More licenses, more betas, and more VMworld. But starting in 2012, we will also have more vExperts, to include more VMware enthusiasts who may be doing their work of sharing the know-how away from the limelight of the Internet and public events.

Our vExperts in the past have for the most part fallen into two implicit groups: bloggers/writers/evangelists and VMUG leaders. This year, we are making explicit three different paths to becoming a vExpert.  As always, the common theme for the established and the new vExpert paths will be going above and beyond your day job to help others be successful with VMware solutions.

Evangelist Path
The Evangelist Path includes book authors, bloggers, tool builders, public speakers, and other IT professionals who share their knowledge and passion with others with the leverage of a personal public platform to reach many people. Employees of VMware can now also apply via the Evangelist path.

Customer Path
The Customer Path is for internal evangelists and community leaders from VMware customer organizations. They have contributed to success stories, customer references, or public interviews and talks, or were active community contributors, such as VMUG leaders.

VPN (VMware Partner Network) Path
The VPN Path is for employees of our partner companies who lead with passion and by example, who are committed to continuous learning and to making their technical knowledge and expertise available to many. This can take shape of event participation, video, IP generation, as well as public speaking engagements.

Although we’re making the three pathways explicit this year, as always, there will remain a single vExpert designation; we aren’t splitting the program into sections. The only change is that now you will be able to select which application path to take, depending on where your main contributions lie.

You will find more details and a link to the application form at vmware.com/go/vexpert2012

The vExpert 2012 page also has a link to an invitation form that you can use to encourage your friends and colleagues who did not previously qualify for a vExpert designation as an Evangelist to apply in the other paths.

VMware vExpert Benefits:

• Public recognition of the vExpert award with a certificate, gift, permission to display a logo, and inclusion in any public vExpert listing

• Access to a private vExpert community of your peers

• Free subscription to conference session materials on VMworld.com

• Access to exclusive events, beta programs, software licenses, and other exclusive opportunities to participate in activities with VMware. vExperts do not represent VMware and are not required to participate in any activities

Applications are now open for the vExpert 2012 title. Use the vExpert 2012 form to submit your application, and the invitation form to encourage your peers to apply.

Many users assume that virtual desktop adoption is directly tied to the demise of the PC.  But many VDI customers, and particularly smaller customers in education and government, are convinced that PCs are here to stay and will be the predominant endpoint device.  Here are some of the intriguing findings that I’ve gathered during my last few months spent talking with small to mid-market users about their plans.

Everyone acknowledges that the cost and cool factor of tablets acting as primary client computing devices is what gets the headlines.  The reality of non-PC device ubiquity firmly took root for me when smartphone shipments passed PC shipments back in 2010¹.

From this tablet and smartphone-centric view, one would conclude that Microsoft apps are simply a legacy burden to be endured only until all-web-all-the-time-apps take over.  Less expensive thin clients, zero clients, and mobile client devices would logically replace PCs as user clients and importantly, the Microsoft tax on traditional PC use ends.  

But after speaking with users well-versed in VDI, the opposite conclusion is holding true– namely that fully functional PCs remain alive and well in a VDI world – although the PCs often become the property of a different owner.   There are three reasons favoring the continued use of PCs in smaller-scale desktop virtualization programs.

First is the reality-check that comes when someone actually tries to run a Windows app on an iPad.  Guess what?  It’s not so easy.  Windows screens are invariably the wrong size, finger taps are not nearly as precise as mouse clicks and multiple windows are awkward to navigate. 

Second, while tablets are outstanding and fun for consuming content, they remain clunky for generating content.  Sure, not everyone builds PowerPoints, writes lengthy Word docs, or creates detailed Excel spreadsheets.  However, for those that do, like in educational environments, non-PC devices are simply not ideal. 

Third, VDI enthusiasts in education, government and medium businesses don’t want to own PCs at all – they want to free-ride on PCs owned by their employees or customers.  Medium businesses, for example, are offering PC reimbursement programs to meet user demands for flexibility in supported systems while increasing employee satisfaction.  Secondary, educational institutions are shifting PC ownership to students to minimize capital costs, free up lab space, and shift PC maintenance to the Apple Genius Bar.  There is even a creative move to finance and fund student PCs by lumping PC purchase costs into grant and financial aid packages.

Given that the bring your own computer (BYOC) model is truly about saving money, it only makes sense that a cost-effective, VDI solution that works at small and large scale is what most businesses are after 

The combination of VMware View with the Pivot3 vSTAC™ VDI appliance is the latest example of how creative users can deploy virtual desktops in cost-sensitive, smaller environments. 

Read this ESG Lab review with results of hands-on testing of the Pivot3 vSTAC VDI appliance VMware View 5 VDI implementations.

Guest post by Lee Caswell,  Founder of Pivot3 and Chief Strategy Officer
www.pivot3.com

Posted by
Ken Werneburg
Sr Tech Marketing Manager

Sometimes you have a multi-disk VM where for one reason or another one of the VMDKs doesn't need to be replicated to another site for recovery.  Maybe the data is meaningless like a pagefile or for whatever reason you don't want to use the bandwidth to replicate it. Perhaps it is being replicated through some other means and you just don't need it to be replicated by VR.

This is quite easy to do when using vSphere Replication.  When configuring the VM for replication you simply choose to "Disable replication for this disk".

But here comes the catch.  If you don't have a copy of the disk at the remote site not only will the VM expect it to be there when it recovers, but SRM will now be concerned on your behalf that the VM is not protected and it will make your protection group unhappy.

So there are a few ways around this.  The first is a long and complicated process to take a clone of the non-replicated disk, zero it out but retain the UUID, copy that to the appropriate directory on the recovery site and leave it sitting there untouched so that the VM has a reference point for the 'missing' disk.

The second way is to go through the SRM interface, Configure Protection for the VM and edit the protection properties for the relevant VM. Simply click the "Detach" button associated with the appropriate VMDK.

The status of the "Recovery Site Location" will switch from "Non-replicated" to "Detached".  Your protection group will go through a quick configuration step and everything will be as it should.

Keep in mind however - this means you genuinely do not have a copy of that VMDK at the recovery site!  If things fail over the VM will now boot with a missing disk and this may of course cause some problems depending on what it contained, so as always:  Use caution.

-Ken

By: David Davis

The second day of VMware Partner Exchange (PEX) 2012 kicked off with the keynote address. It started off like no other keynote I have seen. A talented actor circled the room, describing different types of clouds while a gifted artist digitally drew what was described on the screen. 

While the keynote didn’t make any specific product announcements, it was inspiring, visionary, and a sign of what is to come in 2012. It started off with VMware’s Scott Aronson, Senior Vice President, Global Channels and Alliances taking the stage and offering some amazing statistics related to virtualization. If my notes serve me correctly, some of them were:

• VMware has approximately 350,000 customers to date
• 32% growth year after year and 85% of sales come from VMware partners
• VMware is in 95% of enterprises today
• The cloud computing market represents a $41.5 B opportunity by 2015
• SMBs are only 20-30% virtualized
• 215,000 partners were trained last year on VMware technologies

Scott went on to say that the VMware approach to the market must change to focus not only on enterprise and commercial segments but also the SMB. In order to do that, VMware is announcing a SMB accreditation for partners. Overall, Scott rallied partners to capitalize on the opportunity before them.

Next, VMware CEO Paul Maritz took the stage. He talked about how VMware’s goal is to continually transform IT and evolve the software-based datacenter. Paul pointed out that 1 VM is created every 6 seconds, and 25 million virtual machines are running on vSphere today. Over 50% of the world’s workloads are now virtualized. He gave us a history lesson on how well known applications have died off over the years (like Wordperfect and others) and how VMware partners and customers need to make a decision to choose (what will be) the winner.

After that, VMware’s CTO Dr Stephen Herrod (always my favorite speaker at these conferences) took the stage. Steve pointed that there are 25 million VMs in the world and that if they were physical servers, they would stretch twice the length of the great wall of China (also in the Infographic – The World Runs on vSphere). Those VMs must be managed efficiently and that’s what the new VMware vCenter Operations Manager 5 (vCOPS) is there for. Steve talked about the new vCloud Director iPad Client, Project Horizon, and Project Octopus, and the new vCloud Service Delivery Manager. 

Steve went on to say that there are over 4,000 developers at VMware who are focusing on “cloud management with less management.  A big part of that management is understanding performance and capacity. Steve pointed to the quote “If you cannot measure it, you cannot improve it”. That measurement will come from VMware vCOPs. Finally, Steve discussed that IT has to become a broker for IT services, not a builder of hem.

After the keynote, I had my photo taken with Elias Khnaser and the VM Monster! What fun!

After that, I did my first VMware PEX Lab and was very impressed. There were no lines, the topics were great (building a vCloud Director lab), and the performance was FAST. If you haven’t tried them, I highly recommend them! I’ll be doing more today, and the lab hours are 11am-6pm today.               

That afternoon, I attended the partner social media strategies session with John Troyer and was impressed with the packed out room. As always, John had great social media tips, based on years of social media experience. In this session not only did he go into details on VMware’s approach to social media, but he also gave VMware customers the opportunity to discuss how they went from social media phobic to developing innovative social media strategies that are bringing in real revenue for their businesses.

As for today, I enjoyed this morning's keynote with Carl Eschenbach, where he discussed why VMware is the best bet for partners (more details on that tomorrow!), and I look forward to more awesome sessions and the PEX party with the Bare Naked Ladies! Enjoy!

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.

Posted by Wen Yu
Alliances Staff SE

VMware® vSphere® 5, which shipped in the summer of 2011, delivers better application performance and availability for all business-critical applications while automating the management of an increasingly broad pool of datacenter resources.  That includes storage technology from NetApp, a valued partner that has worked closely with VMware to develop solutions that work together seamlessly and accelerate the shift to cloud computing for our mutual customers.

As part of that effort, NetApp has released a comprehensive new publication that guides our customers through the deployment of solutions that combine vSphere with NetApp. The new NetApp Storage Best Practices for VMware vSphere (technical report TR-3749) includes valuable new content specific to the powerful new storage features in vSphere 5.

In his recent blog, Vaughn Stewart of NetApp raves about the report. It contains deployment considerations and best practices that have been validated by both NetApp and VMware. Contents include:

• An introduction to storage concepts in vSphere 5
• Updated storage maximums, supported options, and NetApp integration tables
• Support for the VSC with the vCSA or vCenter Server Appliance
• Host Profiles
• VMFS 5
• Storage DRS, affinity rules and maintenance mode
• SIOC or Storage I/O Controls

As you dig into this 118-page report, I suggest you pay close attention to the design best practices on the following topics that vSphere 5 customers are likely to find especially valuable:

• Protocol choices - vSphere5 has full support for NFS, iSCSI, FCP and FCoE. Ever wonder which protocol to use and what to expect with each, in terms of usability, supportability and performance?  The protocol benefits and considerations sections of the report will give you a clear rundown of what to expect with each, and guides you through all the way.
• Virtual Storage Console integration with VMware vCenter ™ - If you have not used the Virtual Storage Console, then this section is also a must-read.  Virtual Storage Console enables VI Administrators to have more visibility into the storage “black box”. When storage volumes are presented to the ESX server clusters, admins do not have any visibility into the volume: for example, datastore to flexvol relationship, dedup setting, actual volume size when thin provisioning is enabled.  VSC completes the picture and brings all relevant storage backend related info to the VI admin.
• Storage IO Control usage with NFS and VMFS storage - With intelligent storage like NetApp FAS systems, SIOC settings can be configured to match with the array side for end-to-end quality of service control for the cloud infrastructure.
• Storage DRS considerations - When Storage DRS is configured to run in automatic mode, the storage vMotion migrations of VMs between datastores have implications on dedup enabled volumes.  Read this section and make sure all considerations are understood when you consider using Storage DRS with NetApp storage.

The final product is more than a testament to a great partnership. It’s a standard-setting resource that will speed the journey to IT and business transformation for our customers. I invite you to take a look at the best practices in the report and share your feedback or questions in the comments section below. We're always looking for ways to make our customers' lives easier!

The problem:

    A great majority of data-intensive jobs run on databases, powered by either high-end  servers (sometimes even mainframes). From a traditional data processing perspective, all the data is kept on a single database instance or even on multiple instances, but all sharing the same data. (share-everything, no data partitioning).

 This approach was still valid for a couple of years, and the legacy is there to prove it. However, with the data explosion brought by the last decade and specially on the last few years, most of those jobs are not currently satisfying their goals. Due to relational model, this huge growth on data usually brings exponential increases on processing time of those jobs, specially those ones who have to iterate or search through all the data available. The jobs which handled around 1 million records a few years ago nowadays are handling dozens of millions of the same records and the processing times jumped from minutes or few hours to many hours and even days.

    This problem is specially recurrent on some industries as follows:
    - Finance Institutions - where risk management, trading positioning, cash flow and other important jobs run overnight.
    - Telco and other service providers - running billing batch jobs.
    - CRM systems for any industry - demanding consolidation of customer bases with external systems


    The cost on the delay of those executing jobs is very variable, however always having an important impact most enterprises can't handle. This impact can come from either delays on opening your bank branches in the morning up to being able to handle less days on your billing cycle (and so impacting cash flow).

     As traditional databases only scale well vertically, the database vendor's approaches are to scale the hardware vertically, moving the DB machine to a larger server - of course extremely expensive. Because of that I've seen customers buying machines with up to 2 terabytes and dozens of CPUs only to run their business critical batches faster.

So, what's the alternative?


    To handle big data processing we need another approach. Shared-everything model is clearly limited on scalability and need to handle distributed locks to be able to keep the multiple servers synchronized on inserts and updates.

     Instead of that, GemFire suggests the strategy of data partitioning, where data is divided into the different servers which compose a GemFire Distributed System. Of course this strategy is combined with replication for maximum availability. The idea is data records are divided between GemFire servers on a way each server can now run its data functions independently based only on the data which is currently hosted on it.

     So, as an example if we take a batch job which would iterate over 100 millions of records, we could partition this data on 10 nodes and each one would handle only 10 millions. Of course, adding another 10 nodes would automatically re-partition the data so each node would handle 5 millions records and so on. On a batch processing, function can be distributed among all the members, such as each server only processes those records which are available for it. Like that, we scale not only on having multiple processors working in parallel, but also on dividing the big data on smaller chunks of records and having each server to process a much smaller set of data.
     However, this becomes even more interesting if we knew each of those servers can be standard commodity x86 machines, usually multiple times cheaper together than a single instance of the big machines used to host enterprise databases. This way, we scale horizontally both saving costs and improving performance at the same time, while guarantee linear scaling.

The proof of concept

    The proof of concept was conducted on a potential customer - big healthcare company from Latin America - handling millions of customers and seeing its data increasing about 30% per year.  Due to business model, legal affairs and regulatory / compliance needs, they should be able to run a customer reconciliation process as frequent as possible in order to avoid fraud and unnecessary payments.

     This process which few years ago took few hours to complete is nowadays taking from 10-15 hours due to huge increase of data on recent years. All the possible tuning was done on both RDBMS and data structure, but the results didn't change much and customer is currently only capable of running this process twice a month due to other batches which uses the same database.

     At the moment we came into this opportunity for the GemFire PoC, customer was aiming to grow vertically his database machine once more to a multi-million server and of course pay much more licenses of his database management system, since it's licensed by CPUs.

     GemFire proof of concept goals on 5 working days were:
     - Migrate current batch Job from PL-SQL to Java, acessing GemFire API.
     - Show impressive gains of performance on commodity x86 servers, running production data
     - Prove horizontal linear scalability, showing performance gains while more servers were add to the environment.
     - Prove high availability of the solution.


The solution environment


      The batch job which had around 700 lines of PL-SQL core was migrated to Java on a 16-hour work effort. Partitioning and replication strategies were defined to best leverage GemFire benefits while keeping high availability of the solution.

       The solution was deployed using 16 x  2 vCPU (Xeon 3.07 GHz) 8 Gb RAM server, allocated on a stepped approach to show scalability.  As we were using production data, results taken were compared with the ones from production system to make sure there were no mistakes on the implementation.

Results

       The GemFire distributed function (the migrated batch) was executed against 6, 8, 12 and 16 servers from the same configuration above and results were taken as follow:

    6 server nodes - 128 minutes.

    8 server nodes - 61 minutes, or  ~50% better than with 6 nodes (as we added 2 nodes or 33% capacity)
    12 server nodes - 29 minutes, or ~ 50% better than with 8 nodes (as we added 4 nodes, or 50% capacity)
    16 server nodes - 19 minutes, or ~ 30% better than with 12 nodes (as we added 4 nodes or ~ 30% capacity)

    Those impressive results really showed both extreme high performance with linear horizontal scalability and also high availability, as each server had two copies of its data on other members of the cluster and the many tests we conducted taking few members down didn't affect the results or forced a rollback in any case.
     For customer this really means he can now execute those jobs on a much less expensive environment and on few minutes, which would enable them to do it more frequently and increase business income.

Conclusion

    GemFire can be used as a Data Fabric and Data Grid solution to migrate big data processing functions (as batch jobs running on either database or mainframe programs) while reducing a lot the processing time and saving resources both on hardware and database licenses.
    The impact on modifying source code is usually extremely small compared to the money most companies are losing due to their ineficient data handling processes and payed on the next following weeks of the project implementation. 

   As you might know, this is only one of the various use cases for GemFire Data Fabric. The extreme low-latency and high-throughput case were mentioned on previous posts. 

By: David Davis

Yesterday was the first day of VMware Partner Exchange (PEX) 2012 and we’re off to an amazing start! I heard that this is the greatest attendance in PEX history, with an expected attendance around 4000+.

In my previous post, It Starts Here – VMware Partner Exchange 2012, I talked about how this is my third partner exchange and how you should make sure not to miss specific sessions. Those sessions will start tomorrow, after the keynote session – I can’t wait!

VMware and its major partners offered bootcamps on their products. At the EMC bootcamp, Chad Sakac (of VirtualGeek), Tommy Trogden (of vTexan.com) and Scott Lowe (of Blog.ScottLowe.org) spoke about the latest news from EMC. Over the weekend, numerous bootcamps were offered on VMware products like VMware vCloud Director.

On Monday, I was honored to be invited to a VMware vExpert meetup with VMware VIPs. That was where I met (and had my picture taken with) VMware’s CTO, Dr Stephen Herrod.

I was also honored to see a large sign outside the door that recognized every one of the VMware vExperts in 2011, by name (I am on there under “D”, in the first column): 

On Wednesday, we’ll find out more about the upcoming changes, the application process, and awards associated with the vExpert program for 2012.

Next, I attended the opening of the Solutions Exchange at PEX, which was a huge deal. I don’t ever recall the PEX solutions exchange welcome reception being so large and impressive (they even had a chocolate fountain). The hall was packed with partners enjoying food and drink while visiting the PEX booths. There was even an Indy race car! 

And my company, TrainSignal, had their first booth ever!

After that, I attended the unofficial community tweetup at Margaritaville, sponsored by HP, where I met up with so many great people in the virtualization industry. I love this picture of (left to right), Scott Lowe of EMC, Christopher Wells of NetApp, Eric Siebert of HP, and Jason Boche of Compellent. It shows that storage vendors of all types can finally get along.

Day 2 Preview

Today things are really getting exciting, especially after the keynote address at 9am. Scott Aronson, Paul Maritz and Steve Herrod annunced new Partner Programs, solution competenceies, and rewards designed to help VMware Partners succeed.

On the vCloud blog this morning, they also announced a new vCloud Director Client for the iPad.

Besides that, VMware will be live blogging numerous sessions. I will be attending as many sessions as I can to give you the latest in vCloud news. Stay up to date on what’s happening at PEX with the PEX social media feed and make sure you blog using the hashtag #VMwarePEX.

Have a great Day 2 at VMware Partner Exchange 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.

by Murthy Mathiprakasam & Neha Sampat

Hold your cloud in your hands with the new VMware vCloud Client for iPad.  The VMware vCloud Client for iPad empowers users to view and inspect their VMs, provision environments, and perform basic workload operations –all from the convenience of an iPad.  

Available in the App Store:  Existing vCloud users can quickly install the client from the Apple App Store and immediately access their vCloud Director environments. 

Inspect and Troubleshoot: Inspect running tasks and perform basic troubleshooting, such as checking on configuration changes. 

Quickly Provision Apps: Deploy apps and provision entire environments from your catalog of Cloud Computer Systems (vApps). 

Access Your Hybrid Cloud Now: Use your existing login credentials from a vCloud Powered private cloud or public cloud, and even file related support tickets directly to your service provider from your iPad.

See how it works:

Interested in creating a plugin for vFabric Spring Insight, but don't know where to start?

Jeroen Reijn wrote a great blog on how to create a plugin for the Hippo Site Toolkit (an image of plugin is at the left):
http://blog.jeroenreijn.com/2011/10/get-in-control-with-spring-insight.html

By chance this coincides with a webinar I'm (John Kew) doing this Thursday on plugin development, based off a similar talk I did with Gary Russell at SpringOne2GX. You can register for the webinar at: http://www.springsource.com/webinars

We are working furiously towards our 1.8 release for AppInsight 1.1 and vFabric 5.1. We also have a bunch of work going into the next major 2.0 release of Insight. We have a great number of new plugins and features coming. Get ready for some sweet Insighty action!

Save 10% when you enter promo code ‘FUSIONLOVESLION’ at checkout!

Recently chosen by Macworld as the best way to run Windows
on a Mac, VMware Fusion® 4 roars on OS X Lion!

Whether you would like to add your favorite Windows programs to Launchpad, experience them in Mission Control, view them in Lion full screen or switch between them using Mac gestures, VMware Fusion 4 is designed to give you the best Windows experience on
OS X Lion.

Hurry! Offer ends on February 16, at 11:59 PM (PST)

By William Lam, Sr. Technical Marketing Engineer

Are you interested in trying out one of our three vCloud SDKs (Java, .NET and PHP)? Check out the videos below that show you how to get started in under 5minutes! You can find additional resources by visiting each of our vCloud SDK community forums including more sample codes.

Note: For best video quality, please view the videos in HD.

vCloud SDK for Java

Download Packages:

• vCloud SDK for Java
• Eclipse

Additional Resources:

• vCloud SDK for Java Community Forum

vCloud SDK for .NET

Download Packages:

• vCloud SDK for .NET
• Visual Studio

Additional Resources:

• vCloud SDK for .NET Community Forum

vCloud SDK for PHP

Download Packages:

• vCloud SDK for PHP
• xampp
  
• HTTP_Request2
• NET_URL2

Additional Resources:

• vCloud SDK for PHP Community Forum

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

by Tom Stephens, Senior Technical Marketing Architect, VMware  (Twitter: @vCloud_Storm)

Today, VMware announced the release of the vCloud Client for iPad app.  Designed for the consumer of a vCloud Director environment, this app provides the ability to manage your cloud with your fingertips.

Some key features of the app include:

-       The ability to create new vApps

-       Through the use of a third party app, you can access the VMs within your vApp via RDP, VNC, or SSH.  Note:  The supported 3rd party apps are:

For SSH:

iSSH

Remoter 

For RDP:

Jump Desktop  

Remoter

For VNC:

Mocha VNC

Screens

Remoter

-       Provides the ability to perform common tasks, such as powering on a VM.

-       Settings can be visualized and modified

 I could go on, but it’s probably easier to just show you a short video:

    Many different reasons do exist on why customers want to migrate from mainframe to a modern platform. Reduzing cost is obviosly one of those main reasons and it basically come on different aspects:

     - Reduzing load (MIPs)

     - Reduzing space and sometimes power usage on Data Centers

     - Increasing the consolidation ratio

     - Be able to run commodity, much less expensive hardware

     - Use a more productive development environment 

     - Employ less specialized developers, since mainframe developers are more rare at each day (and so more expensive)

     Other reasons may be related to time-to-market (or how can I change my mainframe application overnight to comply to new market regulations or support the new product will be launched next week?) or eliminating vendor lock-in.

    Traditional approach

     Regardless, many customers are still very cautious when offloading from mainframe, and this is very understandable. These legacy applications still run the core business for many of them, and although they might cost a lot to maintain are usually very reliable. So, the main strategy used has been writing the new applications (for example, to serve new devices or products) on a modern environment and make those applications access the mainframe to read and write data related to the core business - which is still kept on the mainframe.

     Although this strategy can speed-up the development of new systems sometimes, the mainframe is still needed for the vast majority of data access and MIP usage is usually *not* reduced. Actually, it can be increased as new users (and business transactions) come on new channels and devices, which at the very end always access mainframe data.

     Also, another long-term problems are created by this approach. Data is segregated on two different models - the legacy mainframe model and the new modernized model - which co-exist but are more different at each day. Complex (and high costly) hooks must be wriiten on the applications to convert from-and-to the "new data model" to-and-from "the legacy mainframe model".  Sincronization of data is also a challenge and frequently cause issues, leading the customers to lose credibility on those new platforms and getting more scared each day on offloading from the so trusted mainframe.

  Offloading from mainfame using Gemfire

     Based on this, a new strategy has been used by lots of customers worldwide to sucessfully migrate from mainframe to a much more cost-effective modern pleatform but still extremely reliable, with very close-to-real-time performance on an incremental step-by-step approach. This would not only allow those companies to modernize their development environment but more important highly reduce their MIP usage, allowing them to even fully migrate from mainframe when they are sufficient confortable for it.

     Using Gemfire Data Fabric platform - based on an elastic high performant data grid model - customers can build a distributed, high performant and horizontal-scalable data access layer on top of their legacy platforms (e.g. mainframe). Data can be loaded from the mainframe (or any other legacy platform) and written back to it as needed, although the transactions are done on a micro-second latency rate, using the distributed memory of the Gemfire data grid cluster members, which is far faster and more scalable than the traditional transactions based on disk persistence. Replication between server peers during transactions is transparent, scalable and guarantees as much transaction consistency and durability as needed, fully reliable. Although data is asynchronously written to disk (so, not depending on disk poor I/O throughput) it is is replicated through the memory of the participating peers and chance of any data loss is limited to a catastrophic failure (data-center complete failure) - or as small as on a traditional disk-persistency, traditional database or mainframe approach, However, Gemfire still takes care of data-center reliable replication through WAN network - possibly an alternate data-center (either backup or active-active) - guaranteeing geographical redundancy. 

     This way, the mainframe can still be used to load the legacy data from and as archival data storage, but will not necessarily participating on any transactions (although it can for particular cases). This will immediately speed-up transactions to memory and local data-center network rates and enable to scale horizontally on demand, while reducing the load on mainframe.  Gemfire will guarantee data will still be written to mainframe asynchronously (usually in batches and on a sub-second base) when needed, thus not creating any challenge for other legacy applications which still rely on the data from the legacy data storage. 

     Consistency between legacy datastore and the Data Fabric is kept using events which are triggered on Gemfire on each data access. As an example, data can be written also on mainframe to keep syncronization at each time it is inserted or updated on Gemfire. It can also be loaded from mainframe on a timely fashion or each time a value is not found on the Data Fabric, for example. On the other way, a change on data kept on the legacy datastore can be sent to a queue or trigger a function in order to let Gemfire know some value has changed. 

     The same events can be used to notify client applications on simple changes in values stored on the Data Fabric or even based on complex criteria (so, server-side continuously running query).

     A combination of those data events which can be based on either simple or complex criteria and trigger other events can be seen as an embedded, data-friendly Complex Event Processing (CEP) platform, which can also build a extremely valuable business real-time on demand data platform. 

     However, probably one of the most exciting characteristic of this approach is the Data Fabric will run on commodity hardware and will scale horizontally on a linear base. This means customers can start with very small environments and add more servers when needed / desired, which would immediately increase not only the memory capacity, but also the processing power, while Gemfire works as a grid computing platform, distributing the processing between peers (Read: Running jobs on mainframe < link to other article>). Most cases report enhancements on transaction throughput on an order of hundreds to thousands of times and speed-up jobs which traditionally ran on hours to a few minutes or even seconds. 

     Based on this, Gemfire would be suitable for basically two different use cases on offloading from Mainframe:

     - Low-latency, high volume data transactions. 

      - Long-running, data intensive jobs - such as batches running overnight

     Wrap-up

     Gemfire has been used with great success as the distributed data platform for core business of large enterprises all over the world for the last decade on important industries like finance trading and telco pre-paid real-time charging. It has a very important fit on VMWare's Cloud Application Platform offering, solving a number of challenges for data in a modern world, such as the classical horizontal scalability issue of relational databases, disk I/O bottleneck, big data / data explosion and scalable access to legacy.  Return on investment for such projects has been as fast as a few months, based on high platform cost savings and business advantage acchieved.

        Most customers start by using Gemfire on top of their legacy platforms (e.g. traditional RDBMS', mainframes, file-based persistence) to immediately gain dramatic performance increase on their transactions. Overtime, they gradually start modernizing their applications to access data directly from Gemfire, and some of them even realize they don't need their legacy platforms anymore.

VMware Fusion4 + OSX Lion=Get 10% OFF VMware Fusion February 14th through February 16th, 2012 until 11:59 PM (PST). Hurry! Limited Time Offer, Act Now! (Available- Worldwide)

Get details here...

Do more than you ever thought possible with your PC.   Use VMware Workstation to save time by running multiple version of Windows, Linux or a full web or cloud environment right on your PC.  Or run VMware Workstation as a server to share virtual machines with your teammates, department, or organization. Then when you are ready to move to the internal cloud, quickly drag and drop to upload your virtual machines to vSphere.  Try it today and experience why Workstation is recognized for its ease of use, comprehensive feature set, and high performance.              

Celebrate Valentine’s Day with our ‘Can’t-Miss Deal’, Save 20% OFF VMware Workstation February 14th through February 16th, 2012 until 11:59 PM (PST). Hurry! Limited Time Offer, Act Now! (Available- Worldwide)

Get the details here....

Does any population demand more from its technology than university students? In exchange for tuition and fees, they expect a satisfying educational experience delivered via fast, reliable, feature-rich technology. They want access on campus and from a variety of devices including their iPads. 

To meet the anytime, anywhere demands of its 6,600 students and 1,100 employees, Texas A&M University–Kingsville turned to VMware View™ desktop virtualization for an agile and adaptive solution. View addresses end-users’ technology expectations while enabling the university to gain a market edge, upgrade its security profile, and centralize and streamline the maintenance of 4,000 PCs across campus—all while controlling costs.

Benefits to Students and Employees
At present, some 240 View virtual images are available to students at Texas A&M University–Kingsville, primarily at zero-client stations in lab classrooms. But older PCs across campus also provide a portal to those frequently refreshed View images. And the university is planning two rollouts of approximately 160 more virtual images in public areas. 

“The target end-user for VMware View is the student who accesses labs for supplemental work,” says Bob Paulson, associate vice president of technology and CIO at Texas A&M University–Kingsville.

But any student can access View with a unique login—to write papers, pay bills or register for classes.

“Students using virtual desktops get a more powerful, faster computer (than they did using older PCs),” says Robert Miller, associate CIO. “That means a better learning experience, with more capabilities.”

Students also save money on software and hardware.

For university employees, VMware View means faster, more reliable access to 50 fixed images offering upgraded software, which they can tap into on campus, from home or via mobile devices.

Read more about Texas A&M University–Kingsville and their VMware View deployment...

By William Lam, Sr. Technical Marketing Engineer

There was a recent blog article that references VMware KB 1022312 that provides a manual method of enabling a new feature in vSphere 5 for a distributed portgroup called Auto Expand. As the KB explains, Auto Expand is a new advanced option for a distributed portgroup (Static Binding only) that allows for the number of ports to automatically increase by a predefined amount (increment of 10) when it is about to run out of ports. This is a really neat feature with the distributed vSwitch and allows users to still continue to provision new virtual machines and not require a system administrator to manually increase the number of ports.

The one caveat is that this advanced option is disabled by default and there is no option within the vSphere Client UI to enable this feature. The VMware KB outlines the steps to enable Auto Expand using the vSphere MOB, but the the process is not very user friendly and can be tedious for enabling several dozen distributed portgroups.

Though enabling Auto Expand is not available through the vSphere Client, it is available using the vSphere API. The property autoExpand is under distributed portgroup and can be queried or reconfigured by calling the ReconfigureDVPortgroup_Task API method.

We will walk through an example of how Auto Expand works and provide a sample vSphere SDK for Perl script that allows you to check whether or not Auto Expand is enabled for your distributed portgroups and allowing you to enable or disable the feature.

Disclaimer: This script is provided for informational/educational purposes only. It should be thoroughly tested before attempting to use in a production environment.

vSphere SDK for Perl

Download script: updatedvPortgroupAutoExpand.pl

Usage: To run the script you will need to have VMware vCLI installed on either a Windows/Linux system or you can use the VMware vMA appliance.

Here is an example of a distributed vSwitch with several portgroups, we will focus on the Stage portgroup which currently is only configured with 2 ports:

To get a listing of all portgroups (Static Binding only), the number of ports configured and whether Auto Expand is enabled or not, use the “list” operation:
vi-admin@vma5:~> ./updatedvPortgroupAutoExpand.pl --server pod-vc --username root --operation list
Enter password:
dvSwitch: dvSwitch1
   dvSwitch-DVUplinks-462    4    false
   Development    10    false
   Stage    2    false
dvSwitch: dvSwitch2
   dvSwitch2-DVUplinks-476    0    false
   dvPortGroup    128    false

You can also specify the optional --dvswitch flag to only view from a specific distributed vSwitch:
vi-admin@vma5:~> ./updatedvPortgroupAutoExpand.pl --server pod-vc --username root --operation list --dvswitch dvSwitch1
Enter password:
dvSwitch: dvSwitch1
   dvSwitch-DVUplinks-462    4    false
   Development    10    false
   Stage    2    false

To enable Auto Expand for a particular dvPortgroup, use the “enable” operation and specifying the portgroup by using the --dvportgroup param (to disable just use “disable” operation):
vi-admin@vma5:~> ./updatedvPortgroupAutoExpand.pl --server pod-vc --username root --operation enable --dvportgroup Stage
Enter password:
Enabling Auto Expand for dvPortgroup "Stage" ...
   Successfully reconfigured dvPortgroup!

To view the changes, you can run the “list” operation again:
vi-admin@vma5:~> ./updatedvPortgroupAutoExpand.pl --server pod-vc --username root --operation list --dvswitch dvSwitch1
Enter password:
dvSwitch: dvSwitch1
   dvSwitch-DVUplinks-462    4    false
   Development    10    false
   Stage    2    true

Now we will create a new virtual machine with three network cards and assign all three to “Stage” distributed portgroup. Once the portgroup is about to run out, it will automatically increase the number of ports by 10 and bring the new total to 12 as you can see from the screenshot below:

Though this feature can be really useful, it would also be good to know when this occurs to ensure that the networking environment is being sized and configured correctly. You can easily do so by configuring a custom vCenter  alarm to notify you when this occurs for distributed portgroups that have Auto Expand feature.

The alarm must be created on a per distributed portgroup level, click on the “Alarms” tab of the portgroup and create a new alarm:
Next you under the “Event”, add a new trigger called “dvPort group reconfigured” and then click on Advanced Conditions. Select “configSpec.autoExpand” and use the “equal to” to “true”. 

This will allow you to monitor when port count is automatically increased and take the appropriate action such as an email or an SNMP trap.

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

After a brief hiatus, we were glad to restart #cloudtalk in January and discuss 2012 predictions – what’s next in the cloud. Co-hosted with VMware’s very own vCloud Architects, Chris Colotti and Massimo Re Ferre’, participants sounded off on everything from hybrid cloud to production workloads in the cloud. For those who missed it, here are some highlights from last Tuesday’s chat.

We kicked off the chat by asking participants if they agreed with the buzz that 2012 is the year of the hybrid cloud.

@mreferre agreed but added that tools need to deliver on the promise of hybrid cloud. @cxi chimed in that 2012 will really be about enabling those realities. On the other hand, @tier3 and @gazzar_rj both thought that 2012 was more of the year for PaaS. @wholmes responded, “If you are an Enterprise, this is the year of Hybrid Cloud. If you are a startup, this is the year of PaaS Cloud,” to which both @Virtacore and @mreferre agreed. However, @jakerobison noted that he sees PaaS playing a big role for new development in the enterprise as well, with @tier3 also adding that as PaaS begins to support more traditional enterprise languages such as .NET, it will be adopted more among larger organizations. 

@bgracely then asked what would happen faster in the enterprise this year – PaaS investigations or the virtualization of mission-critical apps. @mreferre, @mikefoley, and @maishsk all believed that the virtualization of mission-critical apps would happen faster, with @mreferre adding that even though we talk a lot about cloud PaaS and IaaS, many organizations have not even started to virtualize their infrastructures yet.

We then asked if participants believed that 2012 would see more SMBs making the transition to the cloud.

The vast majority of respondents agreed that yes, more SMBs will transition or at least start seriously looking into the cloud, with @Stratustician pointing out that there are many great benefits to incentivize SMBs to make the move, from standardization and automation to security. @rob_rutherford also noted that the cloud is often the best fit in the SME market.

From there the chat moved into the consumerization of IT in 2012 and whether participants have seen more organizations adopting BYOD policies.

@ccolotti believed that BYOD is a good idea with a lot of bad implementations around the concept. @Stratustician recommended that companies should either adopt BYOD or hire more security folks to keep up with the increase in second policy violators, with @daviottenheimer suggesting that organizations could also extend responsibility for security to everyone. @Stratustician also added that the key is to allow BYOD under agreement that security needs to be used, ie. IDM, VPN, content management, and forceover from 4G to Wifi.

To round off the chat, we asked @ccolotti and @mreferre what most of their customers want to see in the cloud in 2012.

@mreferre responded that his customers want vCO most definitely, with @maishsk commenting on his surprise that it took so long for vCO to become such a major component. @mikefoley then added that good automation and orchestration will become important not just to IT but also security in vCloud implementations, a comment which both @jakerobinson and @joerglew agreed. 

@ccolotti responded that his customers want to see production workloads in the cloud, and that it was time to move out of test/dev cloud, which many agreed with, including @mreferre, @tier3, @wholmes, and @ZertoCorp. @bgracely then asked why @ccolotti believed that 2012 is the year of productions workloads in the cloud, to which he responded that people have spent enough time “playing” with cloud and that it’s time to move forward. @DuncanYB also added that people are getting used to the technology and have started seeing it as a proven solution.

Finally @cxi commented that cloud cannot be adopted mainstream without Executive Leadership buy-in, but that 2012 will see an increase of that, which @wholmes, @Virtacore, and @heidigro all agreed with.

Thanks again to everyone who participated in last month’s #cloudtalk, and special thanks to @mreferre and @ccolotti for co-hosting it with us! We'll be at the #PEXTweetup tomorrow from 4:30-630pm in the VMware Community Lounge, and we encourage both PEX attendees and other cloud enthusiasts to join in the discussion. We’ll be highlighting key cloud conversations using the #cloudtalk hashtag, so be sure to follow us at @VMwareSP and @vCloud to catch live content from the meetup! 

All the news seems to be around My VMware as we approach launch. Today, I'm happy to announce our My VMware Beta Community. This new community will provide a public forum for beta participants to ask questions, network, and provide feedback about My VMware.

My VMware is of course our much talked about, integrated, self-service, account-based site that will transform your product license and support experience by simplifying and streamlining your organization's interactions with us.

The My VMware beta is a temporary (sandbox) environment which provides an opportunity for you to interact with, explore, and experience the new My VMware site.

Visit: VMware Communities: My VMware Beta Sandbox

My VMware is coming, and fast! It's going to completely change the way you manage your licenses, open support requests, and even test new products with our Evals.

If you have not heard about any of this yet, or are looking for every new detail you can on it, we've just produced a 2 page, My VMware Datasheet (pdf). In it you'll find how we're simplifying many of the ways that you interact with us on the web. My VMware is Simplified, Streamlined, and Flexible. And it's all in one place. You asked for it, and we listened!

Download your datasheet here

By Chris Colotti (Consulting Architect, Center Of Excellence) and Duncan Epping (Principal Architect, Technical Marketing)

This article assumes the reader has knowledge of vCloud Director and vSphere. It will not go in to depth on some topics, we would like to refer to the Site Recovery Manager, vCloud Director and vSphere documentation for more in-depth details around some of the concepts.

Creating DR solutions for vCloud Director poses multiple challenges. These challenges all have a common theme.  That is the automatic creation of objects by VMware vCloud Director such as resource pools, virtual machines, folders, and portgroups. vCloud Director and vCenter Server both heavily rely on management object reference identifiers (MoRef ID’s) for these objects. Any unplanned changes to these identifiers could, and often will, result in loss of functionality. vSphere Site Recovery Manager currently does not support protection of virtual machines managed by vCloud Director.

The vCloud Director and vCenter objects, which are referenced by each product, that are both identified to cause problems when identifiers are changed are:
   •    Folders
   •    Virtual machines
   •    Resource Pools
   •    Portgroups

Besides automatically created objects, the following pre-created static objects are also often used and referenced to by vCloud Director.
   •    Clusters
   •    Datastores

Over the last few months we have worked on, and validated a solution which avoids changes to any of these objects. This solution simplifies the recovery of a vCloud Infrastructure and increases management infrastructure resiliency.  The amazing thing is it can be implemented today with current products.

In this blog post we will give an overview of the developed solution and the basic concepts. For more details, implementation guidance or info about possible automation points we recommend contacting your VMware representative and you engage VMware Professional Services.

Logical Architecture Overview

vCloud Director disaster recovery can be achieved through various scenarios and configurations. This blog post is focused on a single scenario to allow for a simple explanation of the concept. A white paper explaining some of the basic concepts is also currently being developed and will be released soon. The concept can easily be adapted for other scenarios, however you should inquire first to ensure supportability. This scenario uses a so-called “Active / Standby” approach where hosts in the recovery site are not in use for regular workloads.

In order to ensure all management components are restarted in the correct order, and in the least amount of time vSphere Site Recovery Manager will be used to orchestrate the fail-over. As of writing, vSphere Site Recovery Manager does not support the protection of VMware vCloud Director workloads. Due to this limitation these will be failed-over through several manual steps. All of these steps can be automated using tools like vSphere PowerCLI or vCenter Orchestrator.

The following diagram depicts a logical overview of the management clusters for both the protected and the recovery site.

In this scenario Site Recovery Manager will be leveraged to fail-over all vCloud Director management components. In each of the sites it is required to have a management vCenter Server and an SRM Server which aligns with standard SRM design concepts.

Since SRM cannot be used for vCloud Director workloads there is no requirement to have an SRM environment connecting to the vCloud resource cluster’s vCenter Server. In order to facilitate a fail-over of the VMware vCloud Director workloads a standard disaster recovery concept is used. This concept leverages common replication technology and vSphere features to allow for a fail-over. This will be described below.

The below diagram depicts the VMware vCloud Director infrastructure architecture used for this case study.

Both the Protected and the Recovery Sites have a management cluster. Each of these contain a vCenter Server and an SRM Server. These are used facilitate the disaster recovery procedures. The vCloud Director Management virtual machines are protected by SRM. Within SRM a protection group and recovery plan will be created to allow for a fail-over to the Recovery Site.

Please note that storage is not stretched in this environment and that hosts in the Recovery Site are unable to see storage in the Protected Site and as such are unable to run vCloud Director workloads in a normal situation.  It is also important to note that the hosts are also attached to the cluster’s DVSwitch to allow for quick access to the vCloud configured port groups and are pre-prepared by vCloud Director.

These hosts are depicted as hosts, which are placed in maintenance mode. These hosts can also be stand-alone hosts and added to the vCloud Director resource cluster during the fail-over. For simplification and visualization purposes this scenario describes the situation where the hosts are part of the cluster and placed in maintenance mode.

Storage replication technology is used to replicate LUNs from the Protected Site to the Recover Site. This can be done using asynchronous or synchronous replication; typically this depends on the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) determined in the service level agreement (SLA) as well as the distance between the two sites. In our scenario synchronous replication was used.

Fail-over Procedure

In this section the basic steps required for a successful fail-over of a VMware vCloud Director environment are described. These steps are pertinent to the described scenario.

It is essential that each component of the vCloud Director management stack be booted in the correct order. The order in which the components should be restarted is configured in an SRM recovery plan and can be initiated by SRM with a single button. The following order was used to power-on the vCloud Director management virtual machines:

1. Database Server (providing vCloud Director, vCenter Server, vCenter Orchestrator, and Chargeback Databases)
2. vCenter Server
3. vShield Manager
4. vCenter Chargeback (if in use)
5. vCenter Orchestrator (if in use)
6. vCloud Director Cell 1
7. vCloud Director Cell 2

When the fail-over of the vCloud Director management virtual machines in the management cluster has succeeded, multiple steps are required to recover the vCloud Director workload. These are described in a manual fashion but can be automated using PowerCLI or vSphere Orchestrator.

1. Validate all vCloud Director management virtual machines are powered on
2. Using your storage management utility break replication for the datastores connected to the vCloud Director resource cluster and make the datastores read/write (if required by storage platform)
3. Mask the datastores to the recovery site (if required by storage platform)
4. Using ESXi command line tools mount the volumes of the vCloud Director resource cluster on each host of the cluster
   • esxcfg-volume –m <volume ID>
5. Using vCenter Server rescan the storage and validated all volumes are available
6. Take the hosts out of maintenance mode for the vCloud Director resource cluster (or add the hosts to your cluster, depending on the chosen strategy)
7. In our tests the virtual were automatically powered on by vSphere HA. vSphere HA is aware of the situation before the fail-over and will power-on the virtual machines according to the last known state
   • Alternatively, virtual machines can be powered-on manually leveraging the vCloud API to they are booted in the correct order as defined in their vApp metadata. It should be noted that this could possibly result in vApps being powered-on which were powered-off before the fail-over as there is currently no way of determining their state.

Using this vCloud Director infrastructure resiliency concept, a fail-over of a vCloud Director environment has been successfully completed and the “cloud” moved from one site to another.

As all vCloud Director management components are virtualized, the virtual machines are moved over to the Recovery Site while maintaining all current managed object reference identifiers (MoRef IDs). Re-signaturing the datastore (giving it a new unique ID) has also been avoided to ensure the relationship between the virtual machines / vApps within vCloud Director and the datastore remained in tact. 

Although we have not specifically validated it, yes this solution/concept would also apply to VMware View.

Chris Colotti and Duncan Epping
VMware Center of Excellence & Technical Marketing

Posted by Shobhana Viswanathan
Senior Marketing Manager -
Global Alliances

The RSA Conference 2012 is right around the corner! The event takes place between February 27^th and March 2^nd, at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. Every year has a different theme, and this year’s is “The Big Cipher Mightier than the Sword”.

Top 3 Reasons to attend the RSA Conference

1.     Meet  your peers, zero in on the latest security and compliance trends solutions

With a keynote from former British PM Tony Blair and a strong presence by VMware and its security ecosystem partners  -   this year is definitely going to be a fabulous event!  Attend keynotes, sessions and network with your peers at the Moscone Center.

2.     Learn  why  clouds built on VMware are more secure than any other environment

Clouds and virtualization offer powerful ways for organizations to manage and use information, but security and compliance continue to be inhibitors in their journey to the cloud.  Come and visit our booth #2041 to see how VMware, combined with our security partners, collaborate to develop jointly integrated solutions that improve customers’ trust in the cloud.  We have a slew of partners both big and small – Symantec, Trend Micro, Kaspersky, McAfee, HP Tipping Point, Hytrust, BitDefender, Sophos, …the list goes on!

3.     Engage with VMware social media activities

Attend the VMware and Trend Micro Tweetup which takes place at the VMware booth on Tuesday, February 28^th from 5:00 – 5:30. we will discuss how VMware and Trend Micro can help you secure your customers journey to the cloud. The tweetup is hosted by:

•  Dave Asprey, Trend Micro, VP of Cloud Security - @daveasprey    
•  George Gerchow, VMware, Director, Center for Policy & Compliance - @georgegerchow    
•  Rob Randell, Principal SE, Federal    
•  Jeremiah Cornelius, Alliances Partner Architect

There will also be a tweet-to-win contest where we will ask participants to answer a question on twitter using hashtag #VMwareRSA and those who tweet will be entered to win some great prizes. So visit our booth or tune into @VMwareEvents  and @VMware_Partners to learn more about this opportunity.

Hope to see you there!

Apache HTTP Server
Modifying the time zone/daylight saving time information in Apache Tomcat and HTTP Server (2009869)
Date Published: 2/8/2012

Apache Tomcat
Tomcat blocking I/O connector thread pool never decreases in size (2010182)
Date Published: 2/8/2012

VMware Data Recovery
VMware Data Recovery fails to backup virtual machine with dedicated swap file disk (2013450)
Date Published: 2/9/2012

VMware ESX
Powering on a virtual machine fails with the error: You have your IDE devices (disks/CD-ROM) configured into a state that will not work (2010477)
Date Published: 2/7/2012
Date Published: 2/6/2012
Entering an invalid product ID key causes Windows Server 2008 and Windows Vista virtual machine clones to reboot repeatedly (2008221)
Date Published: 2/7/2012
Fibre Channel Switch Outage leaves pending SCSI reservations on LUNs managed by an IBM SVC (2008333)
Date Published: 2/9/2012
Migrating ESX 4.1 Hosts to ESXi 4.1 Update 2  (2013377)
Date Published: 2/10/2012
How to check what Network/Storage device drivers in use in your environment (2007604)
Date Published: 2/8/2012
The messages log file reports the error: Too many vlans for srcPort x won't track vlan y (2011225)
Date Published: 2/9/2012
Configuring Network Time Protocol (NTP) on ESX/ESXi 4.1 and ESXi 5.0 hosts using the vSphere Client (2012069)
Date Published: 2/6/2012
Oracle Linux 6.2 virtual machines experience slow mouse and window behavior (2013045)
Date Published: 2/9/2012

VMware ESXi
Installing the HA Agent fails on all hosts, except one (2010648)
Date Published: 2/9/2012
Determining the VLAN information from the VEM module running on the ESXi host (2011258)
Date Published: 2/10/2012
Windows 2000 Terminal Server performance degraded when running under ESXi 5.0 (2012205)
Date Published: 2/9/2012
Creating or updating a host profile fails with the error: Socket error: [Errno 97] Address family not supported by protocol (2013184)
Date Published: 2/10/2012
Collecting the Windows Perfmon log data to diagnose virtual machine performance issues (2010970)
Date Published: 2/10/2012
Installing VMware Tools in a virtual machine fails with the error: This virtual machine does not have a CD-ROM drive configured (2010480)
Date Published: 2/7/2012
Decoding SW iSCSI initiator error codes (2012171)
Date Published: 2/9/2012
ESX/ESXi 4.x displays a purple diagnostic screen during shutdown: PANIC bora/vmkernel/main/dlmalloc.c:4758 (2013043)
Date Published: 2/9/2012
Failed write command to write-quiesced partition (2009482)
Date Published: 2/9/2012
Certificate warning is reported even after replacing vCenter Server 5.0 default SSL certificates with custom SSL certificates (2009857)
Date Published: 2/6/2012
Determining the IO statistics for virtual/physical NICs from the VEM module running on the ESXi host (2011257)
Date Published: 2/10/2012
Virtual machines are orphaned after rebooting the ESXi host on which they reside (2013301)
Date Published: 2/9/2012

VMware Fusion
Symantec Endpoint Encryption fails to work with VMware SCSI disks (2013159)
Date Published: 2/9/2012
Converting a virtual disk from SCSI to IDE in VMware Fusion 4.x (2013268)
Date Published: 2/8/2012

VMware Service Manager
Attaching a copy of the original email to the Service Manager call (2009740)
Date Published: 2/10/2012
Buttons disappear from a Call Closure screen when a reason is not specified (2010257)
Date Published: 2/9/2012
Clicking anywhere on the Service Manager Service Order search screen reports a Javascript error (2013186)
Date Published: 2/8/2012
When running Config Port import, Service Manager reports this error: Profile field does not have a profile field assigned - define one (2013269)
Date Published: 2/8/2012
The contents of a manual approval email do not show in the history of a task in VMware Service Manager (2013282)
Date Published: 2/8/2012
Numeric fields in the Service Manager Customer portal accepts non-numeric characters (2013370)
Date Published: 2/9/2012

VMware vCenter Configuration Manager
VMware vCenter Configuration Manager licenses show as Deactivated (2011261)
Date Published: 2/10/2012
vCM patch deployment wizard does not display all patches that are reported as need by the data grid (2011724)
Date Published: 2/6/2012

VMware vCenter Operations Manager (vApp)
Resetting user passwords in vCenter Operations Manager (2013358)
Date Published: 2/10/2012
vCenter Operations Manager 5.0 GA only:  Advanced user interface reports the error message “500 The call failed on the server” (2013360)
Date Published: 2/9/2012

VMware vCenter Operations Standard
Selecting a subset of the vCenter Server inventory to monitor in vCenter Operations Standard (1036195)
Date Published: 2/8/2012

VMware vCenter Orchestrator
vCenter Orchestrator servers with a hyphen in the name report the error: The connection url doesn't match the database type or the required format (2013329)
Date Published: 2/10/2012
Connecting to the vCenter Orchestrator server appliance fails with the error: Incompatible Server Version (2012512)
Date Published: 2/6/2012

VMware vCenter Server
Checking the status of vCenter Server performance rollup jobs (2012226)
Date Published: 2/8/2012
Enabling HA fails with the error: vim.fault.AgentInstallFailed (2010332)
Date Published: 2/8/2012
Uninstalling or modifying linked mode configuration in vCenter Server 5.0 when the vCenter database is unavailable (2013374)
Date Published: 2/10/2012
Installing vSphere Authentication Proxy fails with the error: Failed to initialize CAMAdapter (2010468)
Date Published: 2/6/2012
HA does not failover a virtual machine when Storage vMotion of the virtual machine is in progress (2013020)
Date Published: 2/9/2012

VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat
Upgrading to vCenter 4.0 and vCenter Server Heartbeat (1038521)
Date Published: 2/8/2012

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager
Guest IP Customization in SRM 5.x fails with the error: Cannot complete customization, possibly due to a scripting runtime error or invalid script parameters (2010581)
Date Published: 2/9/2012
Pairing VRMS server with vCenter Server fails with the error: Unacceptable signature algorithm: MD5withRSA (2013087)
Date Published: 2/7/2012

VMware vCloud Director
Changing the database connection password on a vCloud Director cell (2009937)
Date Published: 2/6/2012

VMware vFabric Enterprise Ready Server
Specifying a minimum key length for SSL/TLS in Apache HTTP Server, ERS Server, and vFabric Web Server (2009867)
Date Published: 2/8/2012
Unpacking self-extracting (.sfx) files on 64bit Linux systems fails with the error: No such file or directory (2009935)
Date Published: 2/8/2012

VMware vFabric tc Server
Tomcat cluster manager fails to transfer state with error: SEVERE: Manager [localhost]: No session state send (2009723)
Date Published: 2/9/2012

VMware vFabric Web Server
Redirecting URL requests using the mod_rewrite module in Apache HTTP Server, vFabric Enterprise Ready Server, or vFabric Web Server (2009851)
Date Published: 2/8/2012
Advantages of 32bit and 64bit versions of Apache 2.2 (2010146)
Date Published: 2/8/2012
Running the binaries packed with vFabric ERS or vFabric Web Server fails with the error: No such file or directory (2010199)
Date Published: 2/8/2012

VMware View Manager
Encrypted USB devices require administrative privileges when used in View desktops (2012264)
Date Published: 2/7/2012

VMware vShield
vShield Manager plugin in vSphere reports the error: The remote server returned an error: (404) Not Found (2005703)
Date Published: 2/7/2012

VMware vSphere Management Assistant
Enabling vilogger on an ESXi host fails when lockdown mode is enabled (2009769)
Date Published: 2/6/2012

Zimbra Collaboration Server
Deleting backup labels in Zimbra (2013182)
Date Published: 2/6/2012

Apache Tomcat
Installing EM4J with Apache Tomcat (2011244)
Date Published: 1/30/2012
Using EM4J with Apache Tomcat (2011243)
Date Published: 1/30/2012

VMware ESX
Newly created virtual machine does not install network device when vDS is the only active virtual switch (1029583)
Date Published: 1/31/2012
Abnormal DAVG and KAVG values observed during VAAI operations (2012288)
Date Published: 2/3/2012
Restoring a virtual machine with two or more virtual disks on different datastores using Symantec Backup Exec 2010 fails (2012647)
Date Published: 2/1/2012
Inaccurate monitoring of sensor data in the vCenter Server Hardware Status (2012998)
Date Published: 2/2/2012
Installing the Emulex Fibre Channel HBA driver on an ESX/ESXi 4.x host (1022307)
Date Published: 1/30/2012
Adding a host in vCenter Server fails with the error: Failed to configure the VIM account on the host (1029863)
Date Published: 1/30/2012
VMware ESX 4.1 Patch ESX410-201201406-SG: Updates popt, rpm, rpm-libs, rpm-python (2009397)
Date Published: 1/31/2012

VMware ESXi
Forcing a link state up or down for a vmnic interface on ESXi 5.x (2006074)
Date Published: 2/2/2012
ESXi 5.0 host takes 30 minutes or more to boot due to CD/DVD-ROM support (2007468)
Date Published: 1/31/2012
VMware ESXi 4.1, Patch Release ESXi410-201201001 (2009137)
Date Published: 1/31/2012
VMware ESXi 4.1 Patch ESXi410-201201401-SG: Updates firmware (2009143)
Date Published: 1/31/2012
Unmounting an inactive datastore fails with the error: Cannot remove datastore 'datastore_name' because Storage I/O Control is enabled on it (2011220)
Date Published: 2/2/2012
vMotion fails at 68% with the error: An error occurred restoring the virtual machine state during migration (2012207)
Date Published: 1/31/2012
Editing the virtual machine vCPU settings reports the error: Number of sockets are not supported (2012280)
Date Published: 1/31/2012
Deploying an ovf/ova on ESXi 5.0 hosts fails with the error: Unsupported virtual hardware device 'lsilogicsas' (2012352)
Date Published: 2/3/2012
After a host power failure, vMotion fails with the error: Module is not loaded (2012947)
Date Published: 2/2/2012
ESXi host fails with PSOD when VMFS snapshot volumes are exposed to multiple hosts in a vCenter Server cluster (2007353)
Date Published: 1/30/2012
VMware ESXi 4.1 Patch ESXi410-201201402-BG: Updates VMware Tools (2009144)
Date Published: 1/31/2012
Multi-homing on ESX/ESX (2010877)
Date Published: 1/30/2012

VMware Server
Collecting Windows event logs (2012832)
Date Published: 1/31/2012

VMware Service Manager
Links between linked calls and requests in Service Manager disappear in the Linking diagram (2012401)
Date Published: 2/3/2012
Unable to update the Call Description field in the Service Desk portal of Service Manager  (2012494)
Date Published: 2/3/2012
Collecting diagnostic information for VMware Service Manager (2012820)
Date Published: 1/31/2012
Collecting database information for VMware Service Manager (2012834)
Date Published: 1/31/2012
Deleted items in IPK Scripting continue to appear in the customer portal (2013161)
Date Published: 2/3/2012
Changing the Call Type in the Call Closure screen does not reflect the change in the Call Details screen (2012547)
Date Published: 2/3/2012
The customer appears as Unspecified in the pager messages received from VMware Service Manager (2012776)
Date Published: 2/1/2012
When cloning a Workflow Template the Task Dependencies of Workflow Components are moved (2013024)
Date Published: 2/1/2012

VMware vCenter Chargeback
Reports in vCenter Chargeback does not show memory, disk, and network average usage counters (1030759)
Date Published: 1/31/2012

VMware vCenter Configuration Manager
Unix and Linux collections fail in vCenter Configuration Manager with error: Unable to find the RequestId attribute for the data file.HRESULT 0x80000400 (2012956)
Date Published: 2/3/2012

VMware vCenter Operations Enterprise
Defining metric sets for the Metric Graph and Metric Sparklines widgets (2011714)
Date Published: 2/2/2012
Adding missing fields to the Alert Handler window for email alerts after upgrading to vCenter Operations Enterprise 1.0.2 (2012638)
Date Published: 2/2/2012

VMware vCenter Orchestrator Appliance
Rebooting the vCenter Orchestrator appliance resets the assigned hostname to localhost.localdom (2012535)
Date Published: 1/31/2012

VMware vCenter Server
Assigning permissions to any Active Directory user with administrator credentials on vCenter Server fails (2007018)
Date Published: 1/31/2012
Virtual machine is assigned an invalid IP address after a reboot (2012646)
Date Published: 2/3/2012
Migrating virtual machine to another HA cluster changes the virtual machine state from Protected to Unprotected (2012682)
Date Published: 1/31/2012
Renaming a datastore within vCenter Server succeeds, but the name appears blank in the datastore browser view (2012890)
Date Published: 2/2/2012
Duplicate MAC address when creating a virtual machine (2006344)
Date Published: 1/31/2012
Host license downgrade fails with the error: This key cannot be assigned - features in use (2011427)
Date Published: 2/2/2012
vSphere 5 Web Client service starts and then stops immediately after being enabled (2012473)
Date Published: 2/3/2012

VMware vCenter Server Appliance
Required ports for vCenter Server Appliance 5.0 (2012773)
Date Published: 1/31/2012
Recreating the vCenter embedded DB2 database repository for the vCenter Server Appliance 5.0 (2013047)
Date Published: 2/3/2012

VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager
Installing SRDF SRA on SRM 5.0 fails with the error: SRA command 'queryInfo' failed (2011176)
Date Published: 2/2/2012
Site Recovery Manager 5.0 crashes with  Panic: Assert Failed: "ok" @ d:\build\ob\bora-474459\srm\public\persistence/saveLoadUtils.h:329 (2012335)
Date Published: 1/30/2012

VMware vCloud Director
VMware vCloud Director Memory Used value is incorrect for Allocation Pool Org vDC (2006684)
Date Published: 1/31/2012
vApp deployments fail after upgrading to vCloud Director 1.5 (2006248)
Date Published: 1/30/2012

VMware View Manager
View provisioning fails with the error: InvalidSnapshotDiskConfiguration (2008985)
Date Published: 2/1/2012
Recomposing linked clones fail with the error: Internal View Composer error. Contact your administrator. (2012453)
Date Published: 2/1/2012
Finding and removing unused replica virtual machines in VMware View (2009844)
Date Published: 1/31/2012

VMware vShield
vShield Endpoint license is not available with the vShield Data Security Pack purchased (2012128)
Date Published: 2/3/2012

VMware vSphere Management Assistant
Cannot log in to vMA using the Web interface or SSH (2011061)
Date Published: 2/2/2012
Performing common virtual machine-related tasks with command-line utilities (2012964)
Date Published: 2/1/2012

ZCS Network Edition
Web log in through reverse proxy redirects to mailstore (2012054)
Date Published: 1/31/2012
The Zimbra Admin console reports the error: server mail.domain.net zimbraRemoteManagementPrivateKeyPath (/opt/zimbra/.ssh/zimbra_identity) does not exist (2012958)
Date Published: 2/2/2012

Zimbra Collaboration Server
Postfix fails to start due with error: cannot open file: permission denied (2012965)
Date Published: 2/1/2012

Name: Lars Troen
Twitter Handle: @larstr
Current employer: Atea
Blog URL: http://core-four.info/ http://vmfaq.com/ http://watchingpaintdryminutebyminute.com/

How did you get into IT in the first place?

I've been a computer enthusiast since I was 13 years old when I first started coding simple games on my 8 bit Acorn Electron micro computer. I wanted to play games like my classmates did with their C64's, so I bought a book about game programming on the BBC B (I later also had a BBC B).

During army service (EW) I had my first contact with Unix. HP UX. A new world revealed itself and I tried to learn as much as I could

After college I started working as a consultant and since I had *ux experience I was given a lot of security related tasks, since the best supported operating systems for hosting firewalls were HPUX and SunOS (mainly CheckPoint & Eagle/Axent/Symantec Raptor). During (or maybe near the end of) the dot com era I joined a company as a programmer and did low and high level programming on different projects before I started working with ESX in 2003 as a consultant and sysadmin. I later started as a consultant with a VAR.

How did you get into working with VMware and becoming a 2011 vExpert?

As mentioned above, I started out with ESX 2.0 in 2003 and was quickly familiar with the VMware newsgroups where I met other people who had discovered VMware's products.

I wrote some graphical performance tool and later I was active in the new web based forums and also other forums on the internet. After the horrible VMTN upgrade in the autumn of 2007 I moved much of my forum activity to Experts-Exchange, but I also used IRC quite a bit at the time. I started blogging on the VMTN Community blog

(http://communities.vmware.com/people/larstr/blog) and I've later moved to my own domain (http://core-four.info/). I'm also contributing to an unofficial knowledgebase at http://vmfaq.com/ and I have a site for my web app at http://vmktree.org/

What would you tell someone who wanted to get a job like yours to do?

1. It's better to know a lot about everything than a little bit about nothing. However: "Jack or all trades, Master of none" may not be optimal so learn to master at least _one_ technology well.

2. Keep your eyes & ears open to other's ideas and emerging technology.

3. if(possible_good_or_perhaps_crazy_idea=true){action(activate_now);}

else {forget(fade_away);}

Learn how the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute is using VMware Zimbra to enhance collaboration and communication between its scientists, engineers and operations staff to further oceanographic research.

By Ben Chong, Sr Product Manager, Linux and Thin Clients, VMware

Now that VMware Partner Exchange (also known as PEX) is upon us, I would like to highlight the fruits of our collaboration with an important partner: Canonical.

Canonical just announced Ubuntu Business Desktop Remix, a new version of the popular Ubuntu Linux operating specially optimized for business with just the core applications needed in the business environment.

Canonical did their research talking to business to see what software they needed and as a result the VMware View Client is a key application included with the Remix edition.

This means that businesses or organizations looking to adopt Linux as the default operating system on PCs can still provide their users with access to legacy Windows applications using VMware View right out of the box.

Ubuntu Business Desktop Remix can be downloaded here: http://www.ubuntu.com/business/desktop/remix.

We are very excited to see this new Remix from Canonical and believe that it will give our customers yet another option in their move to the post-PC era.

With VMware Partner Exchange 2012 (PEX) starting today in Las Vegas, the intent of this short blog post is to highlight the presence of vCenter Orchestrator (vCO) at the event. If you are attending PEX, we welcome you to join us at the solutions exchange and several breakout sessions covering vCO.

First and foremost, stop by the VMware Booth (#1300) to check out live demos of the vCO and its plug-ins together with VMware Service Manager. You can also check out VMware Solution Exchange - the online marketplace that hosts all vCO plug-ins in a single location - including the ones developed by our partners like Infoblox, Radware, or VCE/EMC.

Next, you can also attend several breakout sessions to hear about vCO:

• TEX1485 - Plug & Played automation with vCenter Orchestrator - Workflow Development Best Practices (Savina Ilieva)
• CIM1338 - IT Automation does not equal Cloud, but automation is critical to the success of Cloud environments (Terry Lyons)
• CIM1449 - Providing a Service Catalog for your Cloud with VMware Service Manager (Joe Sarabia)
• CIM1296 - Cloud Integration Workflows with VMware Service Manager (Ben Lin)
• CIM1206 - vCloud Director 1.5 Solution Integration (Thomas Kraus, Chris Knowles)

The vCenter Orchestrator team has been working hard on its misson to "automate the cloud". You can join us in this journey in various ways - extend your services offerings by including vCO, develop your own vCO plug-ins, evangelize vCO. Come on board!