VMware Blogs

Team Fusion: Countdown to Macworld 2010

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 04:46:36 +0000

So we are about a day away from the Macworld 2010 Expo Floor opening. We have been fairly quiet about our participation this year -- not because we're hiding anything -- but because we have been busy preparing for a very exciting event!

By Day - Booth #749
We will be walking through all of the latest and greatest features in VMware Fusion 3, giving away a ton of fabulous "VMware Fusion schwag," and capturing anything extraordinary that happens within a 10-yard radius on video. Come see us to partake in some of the fun, or just to come say "hi" in person.

Also, pick up a "mystery" coupon code ranging from 5-100% off of VMware Fusion 3 in the online store.

By Night - The Fun Continues.

VMware Fusion User Meetup
Thursday, February 11, 6:30pm-8:30pm
Otis Bar & Lounge | 25 Maiden Lane in San Francisco | www.otissf.com

If you are a VMware Fusion user attending Macworld and are interested in mingling with others who use the product (and love it like you do), please join us for our user meetup on Thursday evening at Otis Bar & Lounge. Doors open at 6:30 pm, with some fun door prizes for a lucky few. Cocktails and a fun evening with great people will be provided.

Entry limited to the first 75 attendees. Come early and come thirsty. Passes available while they last at the VMware Booth at Macworld (Booth #749)

VMware Sponsors Macworld Blast Party
Friday, February 12, Doors Open at 8:00 PM
Mezzanine Bar & Lounge | 444 Jessie Street in San Francisco | www.mezzaninesf.com

A live band, drinks, and a raffle where you can win a copy of VMware Fusion 3 (and more schwag!) to take home to your loved ones... what could be better?!

We hope to see you there.

...And The Show Special - 15% Off!

Even if you can't make it, you can still take advantage of the "Show Special" on the VMware Online Store-- get 15% off VMware Fusion with the coupon code: MACWORLD2010 | This offer expires 2/20/2010.

Regular Price: $79.99 | Macworld Special: $67.99

Enter the promo code "MACWORLD2010" prior to checking out to claim your discount. Buy now

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Looking forward to seeing many of you at the event in San Francisco this week. Stay tuned for live updates from the show!

VMware ThinApp Blog: How to Map a Drive within a ThinApp Packaged App

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 23:27:10 +0000

On occasion, we get asked how to do something like have a drive mapped before launching a ThinApp in the event the app needs to find something on the network instead of the local system or inside the Packaged app. Here is a simple script showing how to map a drive within ThinApp (before the app launches) and unmap the drive once the ThinApp packaged app is shut down.

NOTE: This will NOT be seen as a Virtual drive. Rather, this will map the network drive within Windows natively (like any other network mapped drive) so the drive will be visible to everything - including the ThinApp packaged app.

VBS ThinApp Drive Mapping Script

.VBScript-DefaultStyle { color: #000000; font-size: 10pt;} .VBScript-CollapsibleTextStyle { color: #808080; border-style: solid; font-size: 10pt;} .VBScript-ReservedWordStyle { color: #0000FF; font-size: 10pt;} .VBScript-NativeTypeStyle { color: #0000FF; font-size: 10pt;} .VBScript-OperatorStyle { color: #000000; font-size: 10pt;} .VBScript-ReservedWordOperatorStyle { color: #0000FF; font-size: 10pt;} .VBScript-NumberStyle { color: #000000; font-size: 10pt;} .VBScript-StringDelimiterStyle { color: #800000; font-size: 10pt;} .VBScript-StringDefaultStyle { color: #800000; font-size: 10pt;} .VBScript-CommentDelimiterStyle { color: #008000; font-size: 10pt;} .VBScript-CommentDefaultStyle { color: #008000; font-size: 10pt;} .VBScript-HyperlinkStyle { color: #0000FF; text-decoration: underline; font-size: 10pt;}

' DECLARE VARIABLES
Dim WSHNetwork, WSHShell, objFSO, objShell
Dim sDrive, sShare, sName

' SET GLOBAL VARIABLES
Set WSHNetwork = CreateObject("WScript.Network")
Set WSHShell = CreateObject("WScript.Shell")
Set objFSO = CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
Set objShell = CreateObject("Shell.Application")

' SET LOCAL VARIABLES
sDrive = "<DRIVE>:" ' Set the Drive Letter to map
sShare = "\\<SERVER>\<SHARE>" ' Set the share to map the drive letter to
sName = "ThinApp Drive"
Function OnFirstParentStart
     ' Conduct Drive Mapping
 If Not objFSO.DriveExists(sDrive) Then
          WSHNetwork.MapNetworkDrive sDrive, sShare, 0
          objShell.NameSpace(sDrive).Self.Name = sName
     End If
' Set the current directory
     WSHShell.CurrentDirectory = sDrive & "<PATH>" ' Set the Current Directory only if necessary.  Otherwise remark out.
End Function
Function OnLastProcessExit
     ' Unmap Drive
     WSHNetwork.RemoveNetworkDrive sDrive, True, True
End Function

The ThinApp Drive Mapping Script can be downloaded from here.

Implementation

To implement, do the following steps:

Download the ThinApp Drive Mapping Script (in TXT format) and rename to a file (any name) with a ".VBS" extension.

Save the ".VBS" file in the root folder of your ThinApp Project with whatever name you wish.

Edit the ".VBS" file and replace the current values for sDrive, sShare, and sName variables to something which matches your network configuration.

Example:

SET LOCAL VARIABLES

sDrive

Set the Drive Letter to map

sShare

\\10.1.1.10\THINAPP$

Set the share to map the drive letter to

sName

My App's ThinApp Drive

In the example above, this will set the "Z:" drive to be mapped to the "\\10.1.1.10\THINAPP$" share and change it's name in Windows Explorer to "My App's ThinApp Drive".

NOTE: Don't forget to also disable or set WSHShell.CurrentDirectory value to your proper path necessary.

After saving your configs, run BUILD.BAT to incorporate these changes.

You are now done! Test your app to ensure the packaged app properly maps the drive before launching and unmaps the drive after closing.

VMworld Blog: VMworld 2010 Pre-Registration Available

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 20:43:45 +0000

Sign up to be notified when VMworld registration becomes available in both the U.S. (San Francisco) and Europe (Copenhagen).

To share discussions on VMworld 2010, please visit http://www.vmworld.com/community/conferences/.

cheers,

VMworld.com Team

VMware Knowledge Base Blog: KB 1013206

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 15:48:47 +0000

Today we noticed that one of our recent KBs: Virtual machine memory usage alarms triggered for virtual machines when guest operating system memory usage is low (1013206) has been getting a higher than average number of hits on it. From some of the analytics we keep on our sites we can determine that even though customers with this problem are finding this KB article, they are still calling into tech support for help.

It might be that customers want assistance applying the patches that are recommended in the article. This is more difficult for us to determine, and yet, important to us as we strive to provide everything customers need to solve their problem without needing to engage support.

If you are one of these folks, drop us a line in the feedback space provided below. We'd love to know how we can improve articles like this.

VMware Networking Blog: F5 Accelerates Long Distance vMotion

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 05:58:40 +0000

At VMworld last year, F5 previewed and demonstrated their Long Distance vMotion solution. Since then, F5 has worked on integrating the solution into their BIG-IP product and leverage their new WAN Optimization Module (WOM).

What does this mean for VMware customers?

vMotion over distance on a traditional WAN is constrained by bandwidth and latency. Any packet loss will further throttle throughput as TCP congestion avoidance kicks in. In short distance and bandwidth constrains how far you go and how much you can pump through the link (and how many VMs you can migrate in a unit of time).

The F5 solution does a few things—it encrypts and compresses the data (i.e. less bits to send and it’s secure!); and it optimizes the transmission so it’s less susceptible to packet loss. The BIG-IP solution also automatically redirects the session to the new site.

The end result is a huge acceleration and increased success rate for Long Distance vMotions. Nojan published a table of results on the F5 DevCentral blog that showed a 3.1x to 4.7x improvement in time. e.g. vMotion time over a 1Gbps link with 20ms RTT dropped from 2:38 to 0:38. Another test over a tiny T3 link with 100ms RTT (that’s a loooonnng way) dropped from 13:43 to 3:35 with an increase in reliability of vMotion completions from <50% to 100%.

More info

F5 has produced a raft of information to help you understand and implement the solution.

Press Release is here (with links to other resources)
DevCentral Blog entry with demo video are here (I highly recommend watching the video)
Deployment Guide is here (30-page how-to guide on LD vMotion with vSphere)

VMware View: VMware View Hits The Road

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:56:28 +0000

The VMware Express was unveiled today at the 2010 Partner Exchange in Las Vegas, NV and I have to say that we here on the View team are very excited to see it hit the road. As you can probably tell from the picture above, the VMware Express is a big truck but it’s not your normal everyday rig. Oh no... this one is chock full of all kinds of VMware goodness. The VMware Express is a datacenter and demo environment on wheels and it will be crossing the U.S. and Canada over the next year letting you, our customers get hands on with the latest and greatest technologies in your own back yard.

A good deal of the demos are dedicated to the VMware View solution which is why we’re so excited to see it hit the road. We hope that you’re as excited as we are about this and we look forward to hearing your experiences and feedback as it stops at a location near you. For more information on the VMware Express see the post here. It has a nice overview of the View demos you'll be able to see:

VMware View

Best User Experience – Highlighting the power of the PCoIP display protocol to deliver a rich user experience, perfectly adapted for the network connection and end-point device.

Follow-Me Desktop – Enabling immediate access to desktops, applications and data while ensuring a consistent user experience across sessions and endpoint devices.

Access Across Boundaries – Providing access to desktops, applications and data anytime, anywhere regardless of network availability.

Windows 7 Migration – Reducing the costs and complexity associated with desktop and application migration. 

VMTN Blog: Introducing the VMware Express: hands-on virtual desktops coming to your town

Tue, 09 Feb 2010 00:18:38 +0000

Today VMware is proud to unveil the VMware Express during its inaugural stop at the 2010 VMware Partner Exchange in Las Vegas, NV. This state of the art mobile datacenter, demo environment and briefing center has been built to bring VMware solutions directly to our customers across the USA and Canada during the 2010 Virtualization Tour. The VMware Express is sponsored by Cisco, EMC, Dell, MDS, NetApp, Xsigo, ChipPC, Amulet Hotkey and Teradici.

There are 5 demo stations covering both VMware desktop and server virtualization solutions. Customers will have the unique opportunity to get hands on and dig deep into solutions with VMware Experts. There are demos highlighting the following products and solutions:

VMware View

Best User Experience – Highlighting the power of the PCoIP display protocol to deliver a rich user experience, perfectly adapted for the network connection and end-point device.
Follow-Me Desktop – Enabling immediate access to desktops, applications and data while ensuring a consistent user experience across sessions and endpoint devices.
Access Across Boundaries – Providing access to desktops, applications and data anytime, anywhere regardless of network availability.
Windows 7 Migration – Reducing the costs and complexity associated with desktop and application migration.

VMware vSphere

The industry’s most reliable platform for datacenter virtualization offering the highest levels of availability and responsiveness for all applications and services. Optimize IT services and deliver the highest levels of application service agreements with the lowest total cost per application workload by decoupling your business-critical applications from the underlying hardware for unprecedented flexibility and reliability.

vCenter Server

Learn about this scalable and extensible platform that forms the foundation for virtualization management with the family of vCenter products including CapacityIQ, AppSpeed, Chargeback and many more focused on providing advanced operational controls.

Customers will not only benefit from being able to see and interact with multiple VMware products in one place but can also take advantage of the conference room where they can have deep dive conversations with VMware solution experts. Leaving the VMware Express, visitors will have an improved understanding of the VMware Desktop partner eco-system, VMware solutions, and how they are positioned to address today’s technical and business requirements.

The VMware Express is letting us reach customers like never before and is ready to roll to industry and partner events as well as customer sites bringing VMware solutions directly to the customer. Don’t miss your opportunity to catch the VMware Express on the 2010 Virtualization Tour as it crosses the U.S. and Canada coming to a location near you. Learn more and keep up to date by going to http://www.vmware.com/tour

VMware Knowledge Base Weekly Digest: New articles published for week ending 02/07/2010

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 23:56:42 +0000

VMware Converter
Converting a virtual IDE disk to a virtual SCSI disk (1016192)
Date Published: 2/3/2010
VMware Data Recovery
VMware Data Recovery backups fail with the error: failed, error -2241 (Catalog File invalid/damaged) (1015901)
Date Published: 2/5/2010
VMware ESX
CPU usage spikes after installing VMware Tools (1015674)
Date Published: 2/5/2010
How to exclude A LUN from being managed by PowerPath on vSphere 4 (1017393)
Date Published: 2/5/2010
Consolidating vCPUs for an SMP virtual machine can improve performance for some workloads (1017936)
Date Published: 2/5/2010
The fdisk command might fail on Dell PowerEdge R805 Server with both DRAC5 remote media and a physical USB CDROM attached (1017344)
Date Published: 2/4/2010
Configuring HP StorageWorks D2D & VLS virtual tape libraries on ESX 4.x (Partner Support) (1017757)
Date Published: 2/4/2010
Adding RDM in physical compatibility mode fails: File is larger than the maximum size supported by datastore (1017759)
Date Published: 2/3/2010
Windows Server 2008 R2 64bit fails to install and experiences blue screen error (1015624)
Date Published: 2/2/2010
VMware Fusion
Renaming a virtual machine in VMware Fusion (1015695)
Date Published: 2/4/2010
Deleting a virtual machine in Fusion (1015580)
Date Published: 2/4/2010
No network connection after upgrading Fusion 2 and Windows XP (1016466)
Date Published: 2/2/2010
VMware vCenter Server
Health status tab unavailable after upgrading from VirtualCenter 2.5 to vCenter 4.0 Update 1 (1017656)
Date Published: 2/3/2010
VMware vCenter Update Manager
Enabling Update Manager fails with the error: database unavailable or has network problems (1015223)
Date Published: 2/3/2010

VMTN Blog: Top 5 Planet V12n blog posts week 05

Sun, 07 Feb 2010 16:16:35 +0000

For a lot of people it has been a crazy week. Some of you might wonder why, some of you know what I'm talking about. VMware Partner Exchange 2010. With PEX coming up for many of you that means GTJD, GTJD? Yeah, Getting The Job Done! Being away for a week in my case means I need to wrap up project and answer a lot of emails before it gets out of control. That doesn't however mean that I don't have time to create a top-5.... This weeks list contains the all-star bloggers:

Scott Drummonds - PVSCSI and Low-IO Workloads
At low IOPS the CPU is doing very little work to access storage hardware. In these environments it is simply not worth anyone’s time to implement and use a special driver storage driver. But when 10-50k IOPS are streaming through the virtual SCSI bus, a new approach that halves the number of cycles spent on each IO will noticeably decrease CPU utilization. This is why we created PVSCSI. The current design of PVSCSI coalesces based on OIOs only, and not throughput. This means that when the virtual machine is requesting a lot of IO but the storage is not delivering, the PVSCSI driver is coalescing interrupts. But without the storage supplying a steady stream of IOs there are no interrupts to coalesce. The result is a slight increase to latency with little or no efficiency gain.
Frank Denneman - Sizing VMs and NUMA nodes
ESX is NUMA aware and will use the NUMA CPU scheduler when detecting a NUMA system. On non-NUMA systems the ESX CPU scheduler spreads load across all sockets in a round robin manner. This approach improves performance by utilizing as much as cache as possible. When using a vSMP virtual machine in a non-NUMA system, each vCPU is scheduled on a separate socket.
Jason Boche - Configure VMware ESX(i) Round Robin on EMC Storage
The answer was buried on page 88. The nmp roundrobin setting useANO is configured by default to 0 which means unoptimized paths reported by the array will not be included in Round Robin path selection unless optimized paths become unavailable. Remember I said early on that unoptimized and optimized paths reported by the array would be a key piece of information. We can see this in action by looking at the device list above. The very last line shows working paths, and only one path is listed for Round Robin use – the optimized path reported by the array.
Scott Lowe - Using IP-Based Storage with VMware vSphere on Cisco UCS
From the VMware side of the house, since you’re using 10GbE end-to-end, it’s very unlikely that you’ll need to worry about bandwidth; that eliminates any concerns over multiple VMkernel ports on multiple subnets or using multiple NFS targets so as to be able to use link aggregation. (I’m not entirely sure you could use link aggregation with the 6100XP interconnects anyway. Anyone?) However, since you are talking Cisco UCS you’ll have only two 10GbE connections (unless you’re using the full width blade, which is unlikely).
Gabe - Licensing problems with VMware VIEW4
The problem Jon was facing, was that it was impossible to just add those 20 (2×10) licenses to vCenter without assigning them to a host. Because, in our believe, there should just be 20 licenses in some sort of pool that each VDI VM would take one license from. It is possible to assign multiple hosts to one license so they can share the number of available VMs in that license. What you can’t do is have a host connect to more than one license, which in our opinion would also be feasible.

vSphere PowerCLI Blog: At Partner Exchange next week? Unlock the secrets of the vSphere API with “Project Onyx”!

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 20:11:55 +0000

If you’re at VMware Partner Exchange next week be sure to come see me at my session, TEXIBP1007 – also known as “Getting Stoned with ‘Project Onyx’” on Thursday at 11:30.

If you haven’t seen it, Onyx is a tool that converts vSphere Client UI clicks into executable code, which means that instead of writing your code the hard way you just use a tool you know and love to automatically generate your code. If you can’t wait to get started you can download Onyx or visit our community.

Since it’s Partner Exchange, for one day only I’ll be wearing my developer’s hat and showing how Onyx can help you more quickly and effectively write Java code for managing vSphere.

Top 3 reasons to attend:

Learn how Onyx can help you even if you’re a Java/C# developer and not a PowerCLI user.
Using Onyx means no more digging around in the vSphere API docs to figure out what properties you need.
Learn how Onyx can even help you debug your own applications!

Hope to see you there, it will be a fun and informative time!

vSphere PowerCLI Blog: Your best PowerCLI script could win you $2,500 cash!

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 19:39:52 +0000

In case you missed it, VMware is running a Script-O-Mania contest to find the world’s very best ESXi management scripts. One point that might be worth clarifying, it doesn’t have to manage just ESXi, so if it works with ESX and ESXi that’s ok. So dust off those old PowerCLI and get submitting!

Hurry, contest ends March 15th, 2010!

Full details are available at http://vmware.com/go/scriptomania

VROOM!: SAP Batch Job Performance on vSphere

Fri, 05 Feb 2010 18:44:57 +0000

An included part of every SAP system is the SGEN transaction that is used to recompile all the objects in the system after every system update. This job is run by SAP Basis administrators after a fresh install or upgrade of SAP and requires users to be offline, hence the task should perform as quickly as possible to minimize downtime. 　SGEN has a parallel processing design that is also inherent in other SAP business batch jobs. SGEN should not be confused with the standardized and popular SAP SD benchmark that is representative of OLTP performance and is used as the basis for the standard SAPS rating.

To get a quick measure of how best practices could impact performance of SAP batch jobs in vSphere VMs, I started with some un-optimized VMs to get a baseline. I then applied a series of best practices to the VM and measured their effect on the performance of the SGEN transaction. The time for the SGEN transaction to complete went from 2500 seconds down to about 800 seconds, showing how much of an impact best practices can have on the performance of an intensive batch process.

The server used was a Dell PowerEdge M710 with 2 x quad core Intel Xeon X5570 2.93 GHz processors, 72 GB of Memory, and running VMware vSphere 4. Two 4 vCPU VMs were created and configured with SuSE Enterprise Linux 10 64-bit. Oracle 10.2.0.2 was installed in the first VM. The second VM was configured as a SAP application server with NetWeaver 7.0 ABAP. In this two-VM configuration, the SGEN transaction was run on the app server VM which in turn accessed the DB VM during the processing of the jobs. The SAP_BW set of objects was used for this set of tests.

The first set of best practices applied were VMware specific. The second were specific to SAP and were made by adjusting the profile settings for the SAP application server instance. The final adjustment was to give the app server VM more resources. The chart below shows the results as each change was made:

	Baseline: 4vCPUs, e1000, 10 Dialog Work Processes	Install VMTools	Upgrade to VMXNET 3	Increase Dialog Work Processes to 20	Increase Dialog Work Processes to 30	Increase vCPUs to 8 and Work Processes to 40
Time to Complete SGEN Transaction (Seconds)	2491	2421	1451	1097	1021	813

There are several jumps in performance. The first is the upgrade to use the VMXNET 3 virtual adapter instead of the default e1000 adapter. In this network intensive application where lots of packets are passed between the app and DB VMs, the better performance of the VMXNET 3 adapter makes a big difference.

The other big jump in performance comes with the increase in the number of dialog work processes for the application instance. By monitoring the CPU utilization with "top" inside the guest, "esxtop" from the ESX console, and the SAP dialog queue (with SAP’s dpmon tool) it was clear that the VM was not working very hard with its initial configuration of 10 processes. By increasing SAP dialog instance work processes until the CPU of the app server VM was nearly saturated, the time for the SGEN job to complete improved greatly.

While the CPU utilization of the app server VM was high, the DB VM was still only about half utilized. To push more work over to the DB VM, the number of vCPUs on the app server VM was increased from 4 to 8 and the number of work processes was also increased to 40. This change resulted in another decrease in the SGEN completion time. In the vSphere Performance Best Practices Guide (page 21), it states that a VM with a number of vCPUs less than or equal to the number of cores in each NUMA node will be able to take advantage of NUMA optimizations and have the best performance. This SGEN workload is CPU intensive enough to get continued performance improvement even as the number of vCPUs (8) exceeds the number of cores in a NUMA node(4). However to really determine if this is the "best performance" another test would need to be run to compare a single 8vCPU app server VM with two 4vCPU app server VMs.

These tests show that applying both VMware and SAP best practices can make a big difference in performance. In workloads that are resource intensive, such as the SAP SGEN transaction, using the best performing virtual NIC and adjusting key application settings based on performance monitoring are key to achieving best performance.

VMware Storage Blog

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 17:27:55 +0000

Introduction to vStorage APIs for Data Protection

vStorage APIs for Data Protection were introduced in vSphere 4.0 to facilitate seamless virtual machine backup and recovery. Protecting virtual machines in the VMware environment with traditional data protection methodology had its challenges. vStorage APIs for Data Protection enables partners to integrate their backup/ recovery products; hence, giving customers more choices.
The vStorage APIs for Data Protection enable backup software to perform backups without interrupting or affecting the ESX servers with the processing of backup tasks. A backup product using these APIs can backup and restore virtual machine data from its central backup server or virtual machine without requiring that backup agents and backup processing be done inside of each virtual machine on the ESX server. This allows you to offload backup processing from ESX servers to reduce costs by allowing each ESX server to run more virtual machines.
The vStorage APIs for Data Protection leverages the snapshot capabilities of VMware vStorage VMFS to enable backup without requiring downtime for virtual machines. As a result, backups can be performed non-disruptively at any time of the day without requiring extended backup windows and the downtime to applications and users associated with backup windows. Native integration to data protection product facilitates user experience that is similar to physical backup. This also results in simpler management and restore.

vStorage APIs for Data Protection support:

Windows and Linux guests
All storage architectures ( FC, ISCSI and NAS.)
Faster incremental, differential and full VM image backup
File level backup and restore

Some people think this is the new VMware Consolidated Backup, but it is not (Table 1.) Unlike VCB (VMware Consolidated Backup), VMware vStorage APIs for Data Protection (VADP) doesn’t require Proxy server and is fully integrated with the Data Protection software such that backup application will leverage it seamlessly out of the box. Though, VMware continues to offer VMware Consolidated Backup to support the existing install base and on VSphere 4.0.

	VADP	VCB
Requires additional download & install	No, built into the data protection software	Yes
Full VM image backup	Yes, single step copy – source to target	Yes, with two step copy – source to VCB proxy and VCB proxy to the target
Incremental VM image backup	Yes	No
File level backup	Yes, both Windows and Linux	Yes, Windows only
Full VM image restore	Yes	Yes, by using VMware Converter
Incremental VM image restore	Yes	No
File level restore	Yes, using restore agents	Yes, using restore agents

Table 1: Differences between VADP and VCB

Although there are significant benefits for leveraging vStorage APIs for Data Protection compared to VMware Conslidated Backup, I would like to emphasize that it depends on the customers’ IT environment and their business requirements. VMware gives the customer the choice to choose the right data protection solution for their environment.
vStorage APIs from Data Protection also provides the framework for VMware Data Recovery product that was introduced in vSphere 4.0. VMware Data Recovery is a disk-based backup and recovery solution that enables quick, simple and complete data protection for your virtual machines. It’s fully integrated with VMware vCenter Server to enable centralized and efficient management of backup jobs and also includes data de-duplication to save on disk storage for your backups.

My next post will be on the vStorage APIs for Array Integration. In the meantime if you would like to read more on the other vStorage API feature, read the blog on vStorage APIs for Multipathing

Author: Ibrahim “Ibby” Rahmani
Sr Product Marketing Manager - Storage, VMware

VMware Knowledge Base Blog: Correcting KB articles

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 13:59:40 +0000

Sometimes our knowledgebase gets a little out of date. Sometimes we inadvertently publish incorrect information. It happens. Because we're human, the odds are that eventually we'll make a mistake.

If you ever find something in our knowledgebase that seems incorrect to you, or you think something needs clarification you can let us know in a couple of ways.

Every KB article has a feedback form at the bottom of the page that you can fill out. These feedback items are processed as quickly as possible by the same people pushing new content out. Be assured that when you fill that form out, that someone will assess the information provided and make the necessary changes. We'll be making some changes to make that more self-evident in future.

You can also Tweet us if that suits your style. Let us know here: @vmwarekb

We encourage you to let us know about these things. You are helping us with quality, and everyone wins.

VMware ThinApp Blog: How to Package a NON-Executable File Such as a Document or Spreadsheet

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 03:58:38 +0000

Recently on the ThinApp Communities portal, VMware Community member "CookieMe" asked a question which sparked my interest. ThinApp has the ability to package an app and assign Active Directory Security Groups to the package in order to limit who can use them. Essentially, CookieMe was asking, "Can I prevent Users A from attaching a file from the 'Bookkeeping' share to an email and sending it to someone?" To put this in other words, can ThinApp be used to restrict a document, spreadsheet, presentation, or other non-executable file from also 'walking off' a company's network? Absolutely!

Some Things to Note:

First and foremost ThinApp is an Application Virtualization solution ONLY and NOT a security product, even though it can be used to enhance other security solutions within a network environment.

This will NOT prevent someone from copying the ThinApp package off the network or zipping and emailing it off the network. It will only lock the ThinApp package to the security group(s) defined, and when a ThinApp package cannot authenticate to it's respective group, the package cannot be opened.

The above dully noted, in this procedure, we show how to make a ThinApp Package which contains a non-executable file.

Creating an Non-Executable Package:

Create an Empty ThinApp Project.

In ThinApp, do a prescan.
NOTE: In Advanced Scan Settings, uncheck all but one option such as HKCU or HKLM.

Immediately do a postscan without changing or installing anything.

Go ahead and select CMD.EXE as your Entry Point.

Use WRITECOPY as the Default File System Isolation setting.

Save the project (don't build).

Edit the project and create a folder called %DRIVE_C% in the project as well as any sub-folders (i.e. I will be using a "Docs" folder).

Create an ##ATTRIBUTES.INI file in the %DRIVE_C% folder and set the folder isolation level to FULL.
NOTE: I typically copy an existing one from the %SystemRoot% folder and modify as necessary.

You may wish to modify the ##ATTRIBUTES.INI files in the %DESKTOP% and %PERSONAL% folders as well in order to prevent users from saving the document out to their Desktop or My Documents folders - thus circumventing your work here.

You may also wish to make the same modification to the SPOOL folder as well. However, it should be noted doing so will break the app's ability to print this document/spreadsheet/presentation/etc.!!
NOTE: If you wish to disable printing, using a Build Option of DisablePrinting=1 will do the trick!

On a side note, for additional lockdowns, use DisableCutPaste=1 to disable copy/paste functionality outside the virtual bubble. This comes with a DisableCutPastMsg=(message) as well so you can replace whatever is copied with your message!

Place non-executable files such as documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in the "Docs" folder (or whatever you have named the folder).

Edit the PACKAGE.INI file

Ensure DirectoryIsolationMode is set to WriteCopy.

[Isolation]
DirectoryIsolationMode=WriteCopy

Modify the CMD.EXE Entry point to look similar to the following.
NOTE: This will be different for your document which is the data container vs. any other additional documents which are just regular entry points.

For Data Container

[My Document Test.exe]
Source=%Drive_C%\Docs\My Document.doc
ReadOnlyData=bin\Package.ro.tvr
WorkingDirectory=%Drive_C%\Docs

For Regular Entry Points

[My Document Test.exe]
Source=%Drive_C%\Docs\My Document.doc
Shortcut=(Primary Data Container Name Here.DAT)
WorkingDirectory=%Drive_C%\Docs

NOTE: WorkingDirectory may not be needed for these depending upon your apps.

Save the PACKAGE.INI modifications.

Recommendation: You can also use Bob Carter's ThinApp File System Isolation Viewer 1.8. Below is a screenshot of the above project through the ThinApp File System Isolation Viewer.

Green folders are set to FULL Isolation, Yellow folders are set to WRITECOPY Isolation, and Red folders are set to MERGED Isolation.

Build the ThinApp Project by running BUILD.BAT and TEST to ensure it works as it should.

Once you've tested the app successfully on multiple systems, edit the PACKAGE.INI file again and enable the PermittedGroups value and add the Security Groups to the PermittedGroups={security groups) value.

NOTE: You can add Local Security Groups and/or Domain Security Groups. You can either type in the names of the groups separated by a semicolon or add the group's SID values separated by a semicolon. See the ThinApp Online Documentation for additional assistance on the PermittedGroups Build Option.

You should now have a BIN folder with a ThinApp package containing your document which only opens the non-executable file for users of the permitted security groups!

One last thing to note here...the above procedure will only work through native Windows shell associations so in my example above, I will need an application natively registered which can open a DOC file (I say "registered" as, in my example, it could either be a natively installed DOC reader or a ThinApp'ed DOC reader registered to the user or system via THINREG.EXE or a ThinApp MSI). Technically you could also use AppLink to link this parent app to a child app containing a DOC reader as well. Either way, the DOC reader application will be launched through the above ThinApp package and open the packaged document.

VMware Security Blog: vShield Zones Reviewer's Guide available

Thu, 04 Feb 2010 00:20:06 +0000

We recently published the VMware vShield Zones Reviewer's Guide. The purpose of this document is to support a self-guided, hands-on evaluation of VMware™ vShield Zones. This document is intended to provide IT professionals with the necessary information to learn the capabilities of vShield Zones and see how they can be used in practical situations.

The content includes a product overview, brief installation instructions, and a walk-through of a scenario that shows the main features of vShield Zones in action.

You can download the guide from here.

VMware View: VMware View Launch Tour and Resource Updates

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 22:58:12 +0000

2010 is going to be an exciting year and we're already off to a great start with a lot of activity happening around VMware View. Here's an update on some of the upcoming activities that should be of interest:

VMware View Launch Tour

Yesterday, February 2nd, was the first day of the 64 city VMware View Launch Tour which kicked off in 6 cities across the US. This seminar series is focused on the VMware View solution and we’re proud to be joined by our partners Cisco, EMC, NetApp, Dell, Wyse and AppSense along the way. The tour runs through March and covers locations in the US and Canada. Check out http://www.vmware.com/go/view4tour for more information and to see if the tour is coming to a city near you.

VMware View Quickstart Education Webcast Series

Part 2 of a two-part VMware View Quickstart Education Webcast Series will happen on Monday February 8th. This time around the focus is on managing desktops and will be a great session for anyone getting started with VMware View or the free 60 day eval. We will be using live product demonstrations to show administrators how to install, configure and manage VMware View. For more information and to register go to http://www.vmware.com/a/webcasts/

UPDATE: Part 1 covering Installation and Configuration was recorded and is now available here: http://www.vmware.com/a/webcasts/details/355

VMware View Podcasts Available

We’ve posted a number of podcasts recently covering the following VMware View topics:

What's New on VMware View
Upgrade planning and considerations
Hot new protocol of VMware View - PCoIP
Why View?

These can be listened to or downloaded from here: http://www.vmware.com/technical-resources/podcasts/view.html

Don't forget to follow the VMware View team on Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/vmwareview

vSphere PowerCLI Blog: 5 PowerCLI how-to videos for your viewing pleasure.

Wed, 03 Feb 2010 07:27:06 +0000

It’s been a while since I updated so I thought I’d mention a few videos I made a while back that give some useful tips in using PowerCLI 4.0 U1.

Video 1: Using multiple sessions with PowerCLI 4.0 U1.

This first video shows a few tips for dealing with multiple sessions with U1. With U1 you can connect to multiple vCenters or multiple ESXes or even some vCenter and some ESXes and apply your commands across everything. There’s a lot of possible uses here but Glenn Sizemore pointed out an interesting use where if his vCenter ever goes offline he’s not sure where it is (Glenn probably uses DRS and vCenter can move around somewhat randomly.) With this new feature he can just log in to all his ESX hosts at once and find it.

It’s also worth pointing out that U1 has a bug that if you use SSO to log into vCenter, then disconnect, you won’t be able to log back in using SSO without restarting PowerCLI. Expect this to be fixed in the next release.

Video 2: Importing vApps with PowerCLI 4.0 U1.

Importing OVF-based vApps with PowerCLI is pretty much a one-liner. It’s about as easy as it gets, what more can you say?

Video 3: New Invoke-VMScript Goodies.

The Invoke-VMScript cmdlet runs a script inside your guest and returns its output. Two major improvements to Invoke-VMScript were made in U1, first you can run BAT scripts instead of PowerShell scripts within your guest. Second, Invoke-VMScript now supports shell scripts on Linux. Perfect for the occasional Linux sysadmin.

Video 4: NIC Teaming Policies.

If you were trying to dream up the 7 deadly sins of virtualization, not having redundant networking would probably be number 1. Think of it this way, you’re putting 5 or 10 or 20 virtual machines into one physical box, then relying on a flimsy little cable to connect all of this stuff to the outside world. If you’re going to put all your eggs in one basket, you have to make sure it’s a really good basket. So everyone who virtualizes needs redundant networking, and this video shows how you can set up, configure and also audit your virtual network settings.

Video 5: Patching ESX 4.

We also added the ability to patch ESX 4.0 and up in U1. It also supports a number of different patching mechanisms, such as web-based, datastore based, and local file based. This video shows what I would consider to be the best practice for patching a bunch of ESX hosts, namely upload the patch to some datastore all the hosts can see and then issue the patch commands as in the video. If you take this approach patching is a lot faster since you’re not uploading the patch multiple times.

If you’re the sort of person who reads fine print, you’ll notice that this cmdlet is marked as experimental in the documentation. Sometimes people call things experimental just because they’re afraid people will use it and they won’t be able to whimsically change it to whatever they feel like. In this instance however, and for reasons I can’t really elaborate on too much, there is a very good possibility this interface will be forced to change in the future. So I would say use it against ESX 4 if you find it useful, but don’t depend on it working the same way when ESX 5 (or whatever it ends up being called) is shipped.

VMware Knowledge Base Blog: Top 20 Articles for January 2010

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 14:57:59 +0000

Here is our Top 20 KB list for January. This list is ranked by the number of times a Tech Support ticket was resolved by following the steps in a published Knowledgebase article.

Upgrading to ESX 4.0 and vCenter 4.0 best practices (1009039)

Downloading and Installing VMware Fusion (1005466)

Restarting the Management agents on an ESX or ESXi Server (1003490)

VMware Data Recovery 1.0 and Essentials Plus licensing (1012295)

Powering off an unresponsive virtual machine on an ESX host (1004340)

FAQ: Supported/Unsupported Devices and Configurations (1184)

Recreating a missing virtual disk (VMDK) header/descriptor file (1002511)

Enhanced VMotion Compatibility (EVC) processor support (1003212)

Upgrading a VMware Fusion virtual machine from Windows XP to Windows 7 (1015396)

Updating ESX 4.0 to ESX 4.0 Update 1 (1016209)

Working with snapshots (1009402)

Best practices for using and troubleshooting VMware Converter (1004588)

FAQ: VMware Product Features and Functionality (1168)

Troubleshooting VMware High Availability (HA) (1001596)

Decoding Machine Check Exception (MCE) output after a purple screen error (1005184)

Virtual machine does not power on because of missing or locked files (10051)

Consolidating snapshots (1007849)

Resignaturing VMFS3 volumes from VMware Infrastructure Client (9453805)

vCenter agent service does not install or upgrade on ESXi 4.0 hosts (1016262)

USB devices sometimes stop functioning and need to be unplugged and reattached to resume operation. (1005565)

VMTN Blog: Top 5 Planet V12n blog posts week 03

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 04:27:24 +0000

I'll keep it short this time as I seriously need to get some sleep.

Scott Sauer - VMware Data Recovery (vDR) Overview
The underlying backup technology behind vDR is the new vStorage API (Not VCB), it takes advantage of a new feature called change block tracking. After the first full backup is performed, Change block tracking examines the virtual disk being backed up and only backs up the differences from the first backup. This means less backup traffic going across your network.
Hany Michael - Diagram: ESX Memory Management and Monitoring v1.0
diagram madness
Theron Conrey - vmware view linux live cd howto
It’s interesting to note, with some additional configurations within susesudio, some tweaking to lock down the gnome desktop, and some more polish, you could easily provide the full thin client experience, completely removing the users ability to launch any other applications, as well as the option to install this “os” locally for longer POCs.
Eric Siebert - The top blog full voting results
Here’s a table with the vote totals for all the VMware/virtualization blogs included in the survey, there were a few others that only had 1 or two votes that I didn’t include. Total votes includes any vote a blog received whether it was 1 through 10. Total points is the sum of each vote times it’s appropriate weight for the position (#1 vote = 10 points, #2 vote = 9 points, all the way down to a #10 vote = 1 point).
Simon Seagrave - VMware P2V – Easy Method to Remove HP Agents and Utilities
When running an HP Proliant server whether it be Windows or Linux based chances are that it has management agents and a handful of utilities relating to the HP server installed and running. Of course this is fine whilst the operating system is running directly on the physical HP hardware but once it has been P2V’ed and abstracted from this physical layer the OS is running on what it thinks is generic non-HP hardware. This means that there is no need for any of these drivers or utilities. So as to free up valuable system resource and reduce the risk of any issues from any of these HP utilities or agents continuing to run on this non-HP hardware it is best practice to remove them all.

VMware Knowledge Base Weekly Digest: New articles published for week ending 01/31/2010

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 23:45:34 +0000

VMware Consolidated Backup
File level backups of a virtual machine fail, but full level backups work (1014358)
Date Published: 1/26/2010
VMware ESX
Root users cannot login after upgrading from ESX 3.5 to ESX 4.0 (1014530)
Date Published: 1/28/2010
Virtual machine fails to power on with Invalid metadata errors (1014501)
Date Published: 1/26/2010
Java in Virtual Machines on VMware ESX: Best Practices (1011663)
Date Published: 1/26/2010
Unable to create a trust relationships between Domain Controllers (1012140)
Date Published: 1/26/2010
VMware Fusion
Installing Apple Drivers (Boot Camp Drivers) on a Windows virtual machine (1012885)
Date Published: 1/26/2010
VMware vCenter Lifecycle Manager
VMware End User License Agreements (1016162)
Date Published: 1/26/2010
VMware vCenter Server
vCenter Service Status shows Xhive data feed errors (1012240)
Date Published: 1/27/2010

VMTN Blog: Top 5 Planet V12n blog posts week 04

Sun, 31 Jan 2010 21:07:46 +0000

Week 4 already. Just one week before VMware Partner Exchange kicks off in Las Vegas. I'll be around, but not for PEX we're doing VCDX panels. I guess this week was all about the NetApp/Cisco/VMware announcement. And for those who missed, be sure to read this article by Vaughn as it captures the essence of the announcement. Now without further ado; here's the top 5:

Luc Dekens - dvSwitch scripting – Part 6 – Private VLAN
Another post in the dvSwitch series. This time I’ll tackle the creation and use of a private VLANs (PVLAN) on a dvSwitch. For those that are not that familiar with PVLANs have a look at KB1010691, that article gives a good overview of the PVLAN concept. And there were several sessions during the last VMworld that talked about PVLANs. The most noteworthy being TA2525 VMware vSphere 4 Networking Deep Dive. In short, PVLANs allows isolation for guests on a shared IP subnet.
Steve Chambers - Cisco UCS: different workload, different configuration, same blade. Simple.
With Unified Fabric you have a drastically reduced amount of physical connections: instead, you run multiple workloads over the same bit of string and separate them using network and storage virtualization. On one 10GbE pipe you can run IP, NFS, iSCSI, FC. Remember those “which protocol is best?” arguments: consign them to the bin, you can now run whatever you want over Ethernet. Just tell a Service Profile what VLAN or VSAN to present to an OS, with a click of the mouse, and you’re done. No cabling or network card work required. Different workload, different network connections, same blade. Simple.
Eric Siebert - Lessons learned in a power outage
Know your ESX command line, if your vCenter Server and other workstations are not available you’ll need to start VM’s using the command line. Even if your DNS server is on a local VM you won’t be able to start it without the vSphere Client. Therefore you’ll have to log into the ESX console and manually start it, if you don’t know the command to do this that could be a problem. Keep a cheat sheet by your hosts with the basic commands that you’ll need like vmware-cmd to get things up and running using the console.
Rodney Haywood - Viewing the vCloud future
In 2008 VMware were talking about "application workloads" and "vApps" which were essentially just containers for servers. The fear was the requirement to rewrite applications to be usable on the Cloud. I think many in the Infrastructure space (VMware's existing customer base) focused on this server focus. Yet there was the key phrase in the speech, the workloads of today and tomorrow. "How do I take my collection of infrastructure resources and increasingly see them as a single giant computer on which I can flexibly run both todays application workloads and tomorrows application loads." How could we forget Maritzs love for Ruby.
Nicholas Weaver - Look I'm A Tool! : vSphere Session Monitor 1.0
I bet at this point you are thinking: “Well Nick, that is cool and dandy but I can get that info from my vSphere client! Way to reinvent the wheel…” Well… now for the best part. This is the real reason I wrote this little app. It all started with my senior engineer, Justin. He had a nasty habit of yelling out “What are you doing?” every time someone did something on a vCenter server. That got me thinking; “It would be cool if something popped up telling Justin someone logged in. And it would be even cooler if you didn’t have to have the vSphere Client running to do it.”

VMware vSphere Blog: Blog Posts from Cycle 8 of the vSphere Blog Contest on ESXi

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 21:49:53 +0000

Blog Posts from Cycle 8 of the vSphere Blog Contest on ESXi

5 solid entries came in over the last two weeks on our focus topic: ESXi. Below are all five.

1. Ron Singler - Migrating from ESX 3.5 to vSphere and ESXi

http://blogs.rupturedmonkey.com/?p=639

Ron’s post focuses in on an ESXi installation that occurred with a customer

2. Didier Pironet – Why Should I Install ESXi instead of ESX?

http://deinoscloud.wordpress.com/2010/01/22/why-should-i-install-esxi-instead-of-esx/

Didier provides a strong comparison of ESXi and ESX

3. Vladan – The ESXi – COS less future of tomorrow

http://www.vladan.fr/esxi-the-past-and-the-future/

Vladan provides the story behind ESXi

4. Stu - ESXi 4.0 Security

http://vinternals.com/2010/01/esxi-4-0-security/

Stu lays out key security consideration with ESXi

5. Alan Renouf – PowerCLI: Scripting ESXi

http://www.virtu-al.net/2010/01/15/powercli-scripting-esxi/

Alan gives users some useful PowerCLI information.

Thanks to all those that entered! Don’t forget to visit our new ESXi pages on vmware.com

VMware vSphere Blog: Winner of Cycle 8 on ESXi

Fri, 29 Jan 2010 21:41:07 +0000

Congratulations to Alan Renouf and his post on ESXi entitled "PowerCLI: Scripting ESXi". Alan's entire post can be seen below and also at http://www.virtu-al.net/2010/01/15/powercli-scripting-esxi/

PowerCLI: Scripting ESXi

As the service console is moved further away from the hypervisor, people are finding it harder to configure ESX in the same way as has been done in previous versions.

Moving forward the only way to do this really is by accessing ESXi through the API using scripting toolkits such as PowerCLI or the Perl toolkit.

There are two basic versions of ESXi “free” and “licensed”, the scripting toolkits are limited to read-only access for the free version of VMware ESXi. When the host is upgraded to vSphere Essentials, vSphere Essential Plus, vSphere Standard, vSphere Advanced, vSphere Enterprise, or vSphere Enterprise Plus these toolkits have write-access enabled and provide a scriptable method for managing ESXi hosts.

So what can we do ? I have collated some useful ESXi methods into this blog post to help you when looking towards the future and trying to automate your configuration and management process of your ESXi hosts, all of the PowerCLI cmdlets will work in exactly the same way they would do with ESX but the below are a subset of useful functions and scripts which are either unique to ESXi or enable the easier management of ESXi.

The initial build of ESXi has no password so lets start there, how do we connect to the host ?

We connect in the normal way but we specify a username of root and no password as follows:

`1`	`Connect-VIServer` `MyESXiHost` `-username` `root`

Once connected we may want to change the password to something more secure, when doing this remember ESXi has a stricter password policy so make sure you have a password full of special characters, for more information on the default password rules and how to change these make sure you check out this link.

`1`	`Set-VMHostAccount` `-UserAccount` `root` `-password` `MyPa$$!`

We can view the hostd, messages and vpxa log files of the host by using one of the following:

`1`	`Get-Log` `hostd \|` `select` `-ExpandProperty` `Entries`

`1`	`Get-Log` `messages \|` `select` `-ExpandProperty` `Entries`

`1`	`Get-Log` `vpxa \|` `select` `-ExpandProperty` `Entries`

Or search for a particular string in these files by using the following:

`1`	`Get-Log` `hostd \|` `select` `-ExpandProperty` `Entries \|` `Select-String` `WARNING`

Or we could create a diagnostic bundle by using:

`1`	`Get-Log` `-Bundle` `-DestinationPath` `C:\Temp`

What about some of the cooler functions like Lockdown Mode or sometimes known as Admin mode ?

When connected to a vCenter we can list the ESXi hosts to see if this feature is enabled by using:

`1`	`Get-View` `-ViewType` `HostSystem \|` `Select` `Name, @{N="Version";E={$_.Summary.Config.Product.Name}}, @{N="State";E={$_.Runtime.ConnectionState}}, @{N="LockedMode";E={$_.Config.AdminDisabled}},@{N="MaintenanceMode";E={$_.Runtime.InMaintenanceMode}} \|` `Where` `{ $_.Version` `-match` `"i"}`

With the help of the excellent function in the ‘VI Toolkt Extensions’ (get them now!) we can even enable and disable lockdown mode:

`1`	`Get-VMHost` `\|` `Set-TkeVMHostLockdown` `$True`

Or to disable

`1`	`Get-VMHost` `\|` `Set-TkeVMHostLockdown` `$False`

We can backup the firmware or configuration so that we can easily restore it again after all our hard work:

`1`	`Get-VMHost` `MyESXiHost \|` `Set-VMHostFirmware` `-BackupConfiguration` `-DestinationPath` `C:\Temp`

Once downloaded don’t forget you can always extract the files, edit them, re-compress and upload them back to the host !

(see this video from Eric Sloof)

And with the help of another cool function in the VITKE we can upload the firmware file and apply it:

`1`	`$ESXiHost` `= Get-VMHost` `MyESXiHost`

`2`	`If ($ESXiHost.MaintenanceMode` `-eq` `$false) {`

`3`	`Set-VMHost` `$ESXiHost.Name` `-State` `maintenance }`

`4`	`Set-TKEVMHostFirmware` `-vmhost` `$ESXiHost` `–localfile “C:\temp\backup.tgz”` `-credential` `(get-credential)`

If you like you can also set the firmware back to default and get rid of all the changes you have made to the host:

`1`	`Get-VMHost` `MyESXiHost \|` `Set-VMHostFirmware` `-ResetToDefaults`

These are but a few of the cmdlets we can use against our ESXi host, do you really need a better reason to start learning PowerCLI ?!

A reminder that some of these actions are also available via my VESI/PowerGUI PowerPack, these can be activated from the GUI when selecting the “ESXi Hosts” node and are available on the right hand side of the screen under “ESXi Utils” as seen below:

VMware Developer Center Blog: Script-O-Mania - Odds of winning are really good...

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 22:56:27 +0000

Folks, Just thought I would put together a little reminder to let everyone know about the Script-O-mania contest end date and some random thoughts on what to buy with your winnings. So far the odds look really good for winning some hard cold cash.

Contest Overview:

- Chance to win up to $2500 for your very best ESXi scripts.

- Contest ends March 15th, 2010

- Details at: http://vmware.com/go/scriptomania

Top 3 things you could buy with the Grand Prize $2500

#1 5 -iPads for you and your friends

#2 A good portion of VCP Training for a friend (who might really need it)

#3 Short trip to PEX Las Vegas, even if you are not a partner it might be fun to hang out at the Mandalay Hotel

Countdown Clock widget and many other great free widgets at Widgetbox! Not seeing a widget? (More info)

VMware View-Point: VMware View for "Thick" Clients

Thu, 28 Jan 2010 19:55:40 +0000

A few months ago, I posted an inaugural blog about VMware’s overall vision for the desktop. In it, I talked about the value of isolating all aspects of a user’s desktop from the underlying hardware that executes it. View and our VDI solution directly embraces this vision and recently with View 4 brought the richest remote desktop experience to market with the PCoIP protocol. Today, I’m going to talk about how we are broadening our solutions by extending this desktop vision to a wider range of devices and use cases. I’m referring to so called “thick clients”, physical devices with enough capacity to run your virtual desktop; Desktop PCs and Laptops executing View managed VMs locally.

Now of course the View client can run on this category of system and the user experience will be just like VDI with a thin client. However, customers want some additional options. Users have never been more mobile, and they want the freedom to access their desktop and applications from any location under varying network conditions including the ability to work offline and disconnected from the corporate network. Additionally, user demands continue to grow for local graphic computing requirements, particularly with rich Windows 7 deployments, Windows Aeroglass and 3D graphics. As the global virtualization leader, we have been developing technologies for our View solution to address the requirements of this ever growing mobile user base. We will be rolling out View Client in Local Mode, a client hosted desktop solution which is currently an experimental feature in our View product portfolio and subsequently View Client in Native Mode, a native client hypervisor.

These technologies enable this class of hardware to run View managed desktop VMs directly on the client hardware. There are many reasons to want to do this. A commonly discussed use case is third party owned or “employee owned IT” (EOIT), allowing many categories of end users to use their own equipment of choice, use it how they see fit, but also give them an IT managed and secured desktop VM that represents their work life. Contractors, partners, offshore, students, and BYOPC employees are all candidates for this type of environment. Moving a Desktop VM to a thick client end point also enables “offline” usage, being able to get work done when not connected to the Internet or the corporate LAN, expanding View to mobile workers and their laptops. It is also suitable for fixed environments where a WAN connection is not reliable enough or efficient enough to deliver a rich remote desktop experience. 3D rendering with use of local graphics acceleration is another reason to move the desktop execution closer to the end point. VMware has been providing comprehensive virtualization solutions for thick clients for over a decade, including Workstation for Windows desktops and Fusion for the Mac. And when discussing 3d graphics functionality, it’s worth noting that Fusion and Workstation now provide support for DirectX 9.0c Shader Model 3 and OpenGL 2.13D graphics.

VMware is developing two approaches for executing View managed VMs directly on thick View Clients because of the disparate demands of this class of solutions. The initial version is what we call using View Client in Local Mode, currently an experimental feature in View previously known as “Offline VDI”. View Client in Local Mode is a non-managed platform, meaning there is a host operating system on the physical end point and the View managed virtual desktop executes on top of that. This architecture is ideal for the EOIT use case I described in the previous paragraph. The host operating system on the physical client will typically be Windows or MacOS, coupled with an enhanced version of VMware’s virtualization technology.

We are also building our View Client Native Mode (aka CVP), our managed client end point solution that will be subsequently added to the product family. View Client Native Mode is a zero touch, bare metal hypervisor for client end points. Like our ESXi component of the vSphere platform for servers, it is delivered as a locked down, monolithic image and is designed to do one thing and do it well – execute desktop virtual machines. Like View Client in local mode, this architecture is capable of providing offline access to View Managed VMs and has all of the View enhancements. However, View Client Native Mode is intended for IT provided end points with zero additional management overhead, essentially bringing the low management overhead of thin client desktops to the thick client world. There are many use cases for this form of client end point as well, ROBO environments where a central IT department is managing the desktop environment for branch offices, highly secure environments where an employee managed host OS is not trusted, etc.

View Client Native Mode is very much an adjunct to the vSphere platform family, providing customers the ability to extend the vSphere environment, its operational improvements, manageability and automation to View managed VMs executing on client end points.

So what are some of the View thick client enhancements that are common to both of these solutions? Features such as:

Security and encryption for the View managed VMs to guard against tampering. IT controlled restricted access to local devices from the VM.
Remote management features such as timeout and remote disabling of a View desktop VM under IT control.
Business continuity - Transfer/replication services that efficiently maintains up to date copies of the View managed Desktop VM in the data center so that it can be provisioned to a new device in the event of loss, client hardware upgrades or even a disaster.
And of course, both solutions provide isolation from hardware incompatibilities.

Well Scott, this all sounds great. When can I buy it? You will see us productize the View Client in Local Mode feature for Windows in the very near future. Subsequently we will add MacOS support for View Client in Local Mode and roll out the View Client Native Mode. I'm very excited about addressing these new use cases and look forward to continued advancement in the desktop virtualization space.

VMware Security Blog: Announcing vSphere 4.0 Hardening Guide Public Draft Release

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 21:25:58 +0000

VMware would like to announce the availability of a public draft for the vSphere 4.0 Security Hardening Guide. This guide represents a new approach to providing security guidance from VMware. As compared with the previous VI3 Hardening Guides, the current guide has the following highlights

Structure: this version uses a standardized format, with formally defined sections, templates, and reference codes. The goal is to increase clarity and reduce ambiguity, make it easier to reference individual guidelines, and most of all, enhance the ability to automate guideline enforcement.
Recommendation levels: in following with the formats used by NIST, CIS, and others, this guide categorizes all guidelines into three security levels. Instead of recommending a single set of guidelines for all environments, this guide encourages more of a risk-based approach, so that individual administrators can decide which guidelines apply to their environment.

Overall, there are more than 100 guidelines. The guide itself is split into the following major sections:

Introduction
Virtual Machines
Host
vNetwork
vCenter
Console OS (for ESX)

The Introduction section describes the structure, recommendation levels, and other aspects of the guide in more detail.

Another new aspect of the guide is the desire to create it with input from the VMware community. This draft is available for public comment for a period of approximately one month. VMware’s intention is to incorporate public feedback into the next revision of the guide, which will be the final version. However, this current revision is the result of a private review of an initial draft, and so we believe that the final version will not differ too significantly. This revision can therefore be used for customer production deployments today, with the caveat that some new guidelines might be added and some existing ones slightly modified.

We invite anybody who’s interested to download the draft, analyze it and provide comments. Items for which additional feedback from the community is desired are indicated in the text of the guide, e.g. in italics/highlighted, with a “TODO” label, in a subsection titled “To Be Addressed”.

The sections of the guide have been posted to the VMware Communities in the "Security and vShield Zones” area. They can be found in the Documents tab. For each section, please provide feedback in the Comments area for the specific document.

VMware Knowledge Base Weekly Digest: New articles published for week ending 01/24/2010

Mon, 25 Jan 2010 01:57:36 +0000

VMware ACE
Validating the integrity of an ACE Management Server third party CA SSL certificate (1017398)
Date Published: 1/19/2010
VMware ESX

VMTN Blog: White boxes and home labs - Community Podcast #79

Fri, 22 Jan 2010 08:26:39 +0000

We haven't posted a post with podcast notes in quite a while, but we're still going strong. If you aren't familiar with our curious tradition, every Wednesday at noon California time a gang of motley VMware admins, gurus, newbies, troublemakers, jokers, kibitzers, and seekers of knowledge gather around a virtual campfire and record a podcast. All are welcome, and a good time is had by all. You can listen to the podcast via the widget on the right, the mp3, or via iTunes. If you ask those in the know, however, they'll tell you that showing up live is much more fun, because the chat is usually going strong before, during, and after the show. We get about 30-50 people live every week, and if you dial in (via POTS or VOIP) you can ask a question or give a comment at any time, because we try to keep everybody unmuted. It's the closest thing you'll get to a VMUG or VMworld without leaving your desk. Follow @jtroyer on Twitter to catch the topic earlier in the week.

The VMware Community Roundtable podcast is up to episode #79, and our topic this week was white boxes and home labs. I get that question a lot for people who want to prep for their VCP (and it's even come up for VCDX, but if you're thinking about getting a VCDX you'd better be able to McGyver a home VMware lab with a toaster, an IBM PC XT, and an iPod).

The topic of building a home lab is an interesting one to me right now for two reasons: first of all, you can now build a complete setup running vSphere and virtual storage appliances right on VMware Workstation. All you need is some reasonably modern hardware and you can set up ESX and VMs, turn knobs, and explore most features of vSphere, all virtually. But if you do want to be touching the hardware, you can still be buying surplus off eBay, but the latest generations of modern servers and storage are affordable, performant, quiet(er), and thrifty with power. It might be worth your while to investigate some new hardware and sell that wind turbine to somebody else.

Links we discussed, with source material compiled by our own Duncan Epping over at Yellow Bricks:

Simon Seagrave was our keynote guest, and he compiled a great overview to the discussion. Highly recommended: – VMware ESX(i) Home Lab – Why, What and How? Considerations when building your own home lab
Duncan Epping – My Homelab
Gabrie van Zanten – White box ESX home lab
For the overkill crowd Jason Boche – EMC Celerra NS-120
and Chad Sakac: Building a Home VMware Infrastructure Lab
Bouke Groenescheij – v-Water: ESXi overclocked, watercooled
Simon Gallagher – vT.A.R.D.I.S – 10 ESXi node cluster on a trolley as demonstrated at London VMUG
Dave Mishchenko – Whitebox HCL. Dave's vm-help.com is highly recommended, as is the Ultimate ESX Whitebox and the VMware Hardware/Software Community.
Eric Sloof’s articles on whiteboxes
David Davis -- My Home VMware vSphere Lab
Eric Siebert's white box picture and
Maish Saidel-Keesing – Install ESX on your Laptop – I had a Crazy Idea
Iomega IX4-200D

As I said in the podcast, this is a topic of high interest and the specifics matter, so if you want to post any details about your own lab or white boxes, just let me know (jtroyer@vmware.com or the comments) and I'll add the links here.

Vladan Seget - Having an Idea for an Ultimate White Box? Or Multi Usage Ultimate White Box.
Rick Vanover - My Home Lab Setup

VMware View: View and ThinApp Integration Guide

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 22:15:41 +0000

Many of you who design, administer, and implement VMware View environments have probably encountered the discussion of how to integrate ThinApp into View desktops. So FYI there is a series of posts on the ThinApp Blog which discuss a strategy for integration. The ThinApp Blog has a series of posts, Integrating ThinApp Packages with View Part 1, Integrating ThinApp Packages with View Part 2, View and ThinApp Integration Guide - Part 3 or you can download the end product of that series . . . the VMware View and ThinApp Integration Guide. The guide discusses several of the topics covered in the previous posts but brings it all together with some task based scenarios that walk you through initial setup and configuration with screenshots and sample scripts.

So if you are looking for answers to these questions, this guide is for you.

How does ThinApp fit in with View Persistent and Non-Persistent Pools?
Should I stream all my ThinApp packages from a fileshare or deploy them into the VMs?
How do I use ThinApp and View Composer together?
Where you I put my ThinApp packages? On the C:, the User Data Disk, a fileshare?
How do I manage updates after the packages are in use?
Will users keep their unique settings like toolbar buttons when running ThinApps from different desktops?
How do I manage shortcuts and FileTypeAssociations for multi-user VMs?

There are additional documents for design and information on specific topics at these locations as well. VMware ThinApp Reference Architecture , Streaming Information Guide, or Deployment Guide

Feel free to comment for all to see or communicate directly to aaronblack@vmware.com or aaronblack_vmw on Twitter

VMware Developer Center Blog: VMware Partner Exchange - Recommended SDK / API sessions to attend...

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 17:58:08 +0000

Folks,

The folks from the SDK / API team will be presenting in Las Vegas in Feb and wanted to point out some of the must attend sessions if you are into building management solutions with the vSphere platform.Folks these sessions should be updated in the session builder soon, for now best to keep track of the Session ID.

To find out more on the event visit our Partner Exchange Site

Tuesday

1:30 – 2:30 TEX IBP 1000 - VMware vSphere SDKs and APIs Overview

2:45 – 3:45 TEX IBP 1001 - vSphere API Best Practices (Extremely useful for folks new to the SDK)

Wednesday

2:45 - 3:45 TEX APP 0105 - Building Applications for your Cloud using VMware Studio

5:15 – 6:15 TEX C 0200 - Cloud Computing: Interfacing with vCloud using API (Update from the overview session presented last quarter)

Thursday

9:00 – 10:00 TEX IBP 1006 - VIX APIs - Managing and Automating Guest OS

10:15 - 11:15 CORRECTION TEX IBP 1003 - Using the VMware PowerCLI for automated installation and configuration of ESXi and vCenter Server for ISV OEM Partners

11:30 – 12:30 TEX IBP 1007 - Getting Stoned with Onyx (Newly added session)

1:30 – 2:30 TEX IBP 1004 - All about Events, Alarms, and Tasks (New Topic )

2:45 – 3:45 TEX IBP 1005 - Developing performance monitoring tools using the vSphere APIs: simple troubleshooting techniques and programming best practices.(90 Minute session, highest rated session of all time - must attend for anyone building monitoring solutions)

Self Paced Labs

SPLIBP1020	Intro to vSphere Web Services API
SPLIV0002	Managing the vSphere Infrastructure with PowerShell

VMware ThinApp Blog: View and ThinApp Integration Guide - Part 3

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 17:41:49 +0000

I started a blog series on integrating View and ThinApp with these posts, Integrating ThinApp Packages with View Part 1, Integrating ThinApp Packages with View Part 2, but I'm going to finish the series with a completed VMware View and ThinApp Integration Guide. The guide discusses several of the topics covered in the previous posts but brings it all together with some task based scenarios that walk you through initial setup and configuration with screenshots and sample scripts.

While I believe that customers get the greatest value out of starting with ThinApp in their physical environment, its obvious that many of us are taking on desktop and appvirt simultaneously with the VMware View Premier bundle. Much of the information in the guide applies to the physical environment as well but its the only doc avail today that completely focuses on ThinApp for View desktops.

So if you are looking for answers to these questions, this guide is for you.

Should I stream all my ThinApp packages from a fileshare or deploy them into the VMs?
Where you I put my ThinApp packages? On the C:, the User Data Disk, a fileshare?
How do I manage updates after the packages are in use?
Will users keep their unique settings like toolbar buttons when running ThinApps from different desktops?
How do I manage shortcuts and FileTypeAssociations for multi-user VMs?

There are additional documents for design and information on specific topics at these locations as well. VMware ThinApp Reference Architecture , Streaming Information Guide, or Deployment Guide

Feel free to comment for all to see or communicate directly to aaronblack@vmware.com or aaronblack_vmw on Twitter

VMware vSphere Blog: You Still Have Time for a Blog Entry on ESXi

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 01:40:22 +0000

Don't forget, our vSphere blogging contest ends this Friday at midnight. Get your entry on ESXi in today for your chance at $100 and a spot on the vSphere blog itself.

Also, check out our ESXi demo by going to http://www.vmware.com/products/vi/esx/esx3i.html and clicking on "watch demo" at the top of the screen.

VMware vSphere Blog: Winner of Cycle 7 on Virtualizing Tier 1 Applications

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 01:35:53 +0000

Congratulations to Jason Nash for his blog entry on virtualizing tier 1 applications. Jason has the distinct honor of being the first two time winner of this VMware vSphere blogging contest. Jason's complete post can be seen below or by going to the following link:

http://jasonnash.wordpress.com/2010/01/09/why-isnt-your-data-center-100-virtualized/

Why Isn’t Your Data Center 100% Virtualized?

January 9, 2010 by nashwj

I understand that may not be a fair question. In many cases there are things that just can’t be virtualized, and I don’t mean for performance reasons. I’m talking about non-X86 workloads and applications with specialized hardware. Don’t forget about the dreaded dongle that some apps still require!

One thing that I find very interesting to discuss with customers is their comfort level limit with virtualization. At what point in their application tiering do they think that something couldn’t or shouldn’t be virtualized. It’s really not much of a secret that I’m a big proponent of virtualization and going as far with it as you can is something that I find myself preaching a lot. I do it for a number of reasons and I’m starting to see more and more people follow a similar train of thought.

From what I’ve observed there is usually a common migration to virtualization in an organization. I refer to it in a three step progression.

Consolidation
Cool Features
Disaster Recovery

Several years ago I was a Network Manager at a mid-sized company. Like most we were in the midst of serious server sprawl and needed to do something about it. Just saying “No” didn’t seem to work. We still had a rack full of 1U HP DL360 servers for varying tasks and groups. There were several for accounting apps that couldn’t run on the same system due to app conflict, then we had a couple with other apps that had Java conflicts….and even more for groups that just didn’t want to share resources or weren’t comfortable with it. All of these systems would sit at 5% utilization all day long sucking up power (that we didn’t have) and eating in to cooling (that we had even less of). This was the reason we first dipped in to virtualization and I refer to this as the consolidation phase. It’s the way to contain server sprawl and do it on low tier applications so you aren’t risking anything major.

We still see a lot of companies in the midst of the consolidation phase but ultimately they move in to the Management phase. This is where they virtualized the low tier apps and started to see the benefit of VMware. They now can VMotion machines around and do maintenance without downtime. They like VMware HA for redundancy and FT even more. Storage VMotion allows for easy storage migrations, again with no downtime. They also get comfortable managing, backing up, and working with VMware at this level. They start to think “Now, wouldn’t it be cool to just VMotion the Exchange server to another server for maintenance instead of that 8 hour downtime on a weekend?”. But they are scared….. Things like Exchange and SQL worry them.

The final stage is the Disaster Recovery stage. I have several customers in this right now and it’s something I talk about a lot. In fact, I did a keynote on this very subject at the Carolinas VMware Summit in the summer. What really pushes people to the next level isn’t core VMware functionality, it’s Site Recovery Manager. They start looking hard at their DR strategy and what they need to do to simplify it. They get a taste of SRM and see how easy it makes DR planning and, more importantly, testing. They see that they can easily test their DR plan any time they want without impacting production and without taking days to build an environment and then days again after the test to tear it down. Those Tier 2, 3, and 4 apps take no time at all in the plan, but those pesky Tier 1 apps still have an inch thick play book to cover each time the plan is tested. There are people out there running a single VM on a single ESX server just for this capability. They get the abstraction and portability of virtual machines while still making sure that super-app gets all the resources it wants.

So what is stopping you from virtualizing those Tier 1 applications? IF you say performance I ask you to check again. In most cases people are scared about I/O performance under any virtualization product. Look at this white paper by VMware. A single vSphere server can do 350K IOPS! If you have an application that needs more than that on a single server I’d like to see it. Here is another great comparison showing Oracle native against Oracle under VMware. That’s also a very good blog for performance related information.

So why do we see people shy away from virtualizing Tier 1 apps? They don’t have the necessary information to make them feel comfortable doing it. One thing we do at the start of any engagement is to gather information, and sometimes a lot of it. We have excellent tools to go look at a customer’s applications to see what performance requirements it has. Too many times we see people just P2Ving a large app and having serious performance problems because they didn’t do the work ahead of time. VMware’s own Capacity Planner tool that partners can use is really good at looking at servers to gather CPU, memory, and I/O requirements. With this information you can really architect out your environment to handle any load. That’s the key. You have to build a good architecture before you start virtualizing these heavy hitter applications and it’s often something that gets overlooked. Virtualization has gotten common and with common comes complacency. When people get complacent they overlook the details that make or break a new deployment.

Once you have the information you need and the requirements for your applications you can then start specifying the equipment and I/O infrastructure. We have customers now going full speed with 10Gb connectivity and Fibre Channel over Ethernet (FCoE). They do this to give those really high-end applications the I/O that they need. While most people will read that and think “We can’t possibly afford that!” they need to look at what it really costs them to deploy applications in a legacy model. If your standard ESX deployment is 6 or 8 Gb Ethernet connections and 2 or 4 4Gb Fibre Channel connections what is that costing you in switches, cabling, power, cooling, and management? You will find that these new consolidated fabric solutions are not much, if any, more expensive then deploying more of these split fabric infrastructures.

In the majority of organizations the Tier 1 apps are SQL, Oracle, and Exchange-based services. What people miss is that these really aren’t I/O heavy. Sure, they can do a LOT of small transactions but that’s not a problem with VMware or even “legacy” Fibre Channel connectivity. Be smart when moving those systems to VMware by planning your I/O, CPU, and memory but also pay attention to your disk layout. Again, another common problem we see is a Tier 1 application being thrown on a datastore in use by other VMs and causing a problem. It’s also common to see back-end spindles shared so even though the administrator has the application on a low use datastore it’s still fighting for spindle contention. Gathering good performance requirements and a well planned architecture will stop that problem well before anything gets deployed.

So, in conclusion, get moving on those Tier 1 apps. If you aren’t sure how to gather reliable data on performance requirements get with a good VMware and storage partner. They can make the difference between a successful deployment and one where you spend your nights tracking down performance issues.

VMworld Blog: Webcast: Virtualized SAP Applications - From the Datacenter to the Cloud

Thu, 21 Jan 2010 00:01:47 +0000

Join VMware SAP Alliance Manager Joachim Rahmfeld on this 45 minute webcast tomorrow, Jan 21, at 2pm PST. Virtualized SAP Applications: From the Datacenter to the Cloud.

For more information on running SAP on VMware, see the Virtualization for SAP Solutions blog and the SAP and VMware page.

Virtualization for SAP Solutions: Virtualized Data Center Summit (Jan 21): Virtualized SAP Applications - From the Datacenter To The Cloud

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 23:21:35 +0000

We will be participating in in the Virtualized Data Center Summit at BrightTalk on Thursday, January 21, and we will be presenting on the move of SAP applications towards internal and external clouds. The session will run live on Thursday, January 21, 2 pm PDT. You can view the live session (and later the recorded session) right here.

We will also be participating in a roundtable discussion at 4 pm PDT.

Sign up and join us!

Joachim

VMTN Blog: Virtualized SAP Applications: From the Datacenter to the Cloud - Jan 21 webcast

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 23:16:15 +0000

Join VMware SAP Alliance Manager Joachim Rahmfeld on this 45 minute webcast tomorrow, Jan 21, at 2pm PST. Virtualized SAP Applications: From the datacenter to the cloud. There's a whole day of good cloud and virtualization talks over at Brighttalk tomorrow - recommended. For more information on running SAP on VMware, see the Virtualization for SAP Solutions blog and the SAP and VMware page on VMware's site.

ESXi Chronicles: Management of VMware ESXi on HP ProLiant Servers

Wed, 20 Jan 2010 22:38:54 +0000

A joint paper between VMware and HP was published recently that goes over another option for hardware monitoring on ESXi systems. This paper describes the integration of VMware ESXi with HP System Insight Manager to provide full hardware management capabilities on HP ProLiant Servers. It also describes the hardware information and monitoring features available with VMware vCenter.

You can download the paper here.

Workstation Zealot: Replay Debugging – Try it Today!

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 18:00:32 +0000

Since the launch of VMware Workstation 7, I have spent a lot of time interacting with customers to learn why and how they are using VMware Workstation. Through this process, I’ve discovered that one of the most powerful, innovative features in Workstation 7, Replay Debugging, has good awareness but not many people have tried it. VMware has significantly enhanced this feature based on feedback we have received from our developer community and our own developers who use it internally. I believe VMware Workstation’s Replay Debugging will help developers save a tremendous amount of time identifying and resolving issues.

So, how exactly does Replay Debugging do that?

Check out this video for a simple demonstration performed by my colleague E Lewis using Visual Studio and VMware Workstation. Then keep reading for more details.

Replay Debugging does exactly what its name implies – it allows you to record the execution of your virtual machine and then play it back later. This is where you may think “Oh, just like a DVR, right?” Well, not exactly. :)
It’s much more than that. We are talking about literally recording the entire execution of your VM as it happens. Not just what you see, but everything that happens under the hood as well. Events, interrupts, memory allocation, changes to disk contents, user inputs and device output… everything. When you replay, you essentially get a carbon copy of what your entire VM was like at the same point while recording. All of the execution happens deterministically and in exactly the same fashion as it did while it was recorded! And, since we only record asynchronous events instead of interpreting every instruction to do this, we have a fairly low performance overhead.

So, what’s so cool about that?

As everyone who writes code knows, code tends to have bugs. And some bugs, like cockroaches, tend to be worse than others. Anyone who has ever had to deal with a deadlock, a race condition, or any timing-related issue for that matter knows just how annoying and difficult these problems can be. You are sitting there all pumped up and ready to fix the problem, but despite anything you try, you cannot reproduce it. And you are just left wishing you could somehow capture the bug as it happens, to be able to investigate it later. With VMware Workstation, you can record the execution of your VM until you catch the issue in action, just once, and then you have eternal access to it! With the virtual debugger you can attach to your code and step through the recording to see exactly what causes the glitch in your app

If you would like to give Replay Debugging a try, head over to E Lewis’s blog www.replaydebugging.com for additional guidance, tips, and tricks. If you do not have VMware Workstation, download a free trial here. www.vmware.com/go/tryworkstation.

Virtualization for SAP Solutions: Oracle support for VMware in SAP environments

Tue, 19 Jan 2010 09:01:59 +0000

Happy New Year 2010 to all readers of our blog I am very excited to make a great announcement just as we start into business in 2010.

In the past months, I have spoken to many SAP customers that told me about ONE issue they face, when virtualizing SAP: Oracle would not support SAP production landscapes on VMware. While many customers continued virtualizing SAP on Oracle despite these restrictions, some did not and had to delay their project. We have worked with SAP and Oracle to improve the support situation and in Q4 09 the stack was already under evaluation.

Now, I am happy to announce that Oracle modified their policy to support SAP/VMware users as follows (see SAP Note 1173954 for details):

1. Since Jan 13, 2010, Oracle supports SAP production landscapes on Oracle DB single instance (no RAC) virtualized with VMware ESX 3.5 and higher
2. Minimum OS on MSFT is Windows Server 2008; SLES and RHEL are also supported
3. Minimum Oracle release is Oracle 10.2.0.4
4. Oracle will support VMware in the context of Oracle Metalink Note 249212.1

Interestingly, there is also a new note (SAP Note 1426182) created about “Support of Oracle Databases for XEN", which clearly highlights that “XEN virtualized environments on the Linux platform impact critical runtime related areas for the Oracle Database such as process scheduling, network and disk IO access. Therefore Oracle does not support to run production databases in XEN virtualized environments.” Also there is still no support from Oracle for Hyper-V.

To make this real simple:
All databases Oracle, IBM DB2, SAP Max DB, and MS SQL Server now support SAP production environments on VMware.
On x86 platforms:
• VMware was the first virtualization solution that supported SAP on Windows
• VMware is the only virtualization solution that supports SAP on Windows and Linux
• VMware is the only virtualization solution that is supported by all database vendors

If you haven’t done so already, now, it’s time to think about virtualizing SAP on VMware. There will be nothing that stops you.

VMware Developer Center Blog: 2010 VMware SDK / API Predictions - by Pablo Roesch

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 19:11:16 +0000

Folks,

It is hard to believe the New Year is already in its second week. I have been a little quiet these past few weeks as it has been hard to recover from my holiday break. I might have spent too much time in an undisclosed remote beach in Central America.

Here are my Top 5 Predictions for 2010.

#1. VMware Developer Community Sample Code site will be easier to use. As you know uploading and sharing code on our community is not ideal. Nava has been writing a plug in to improve the way the code is displayed and shared. It’s still a work in progress and will be released into the wild soon.

#2. VMware Global Support Services will provide SDK Developer / Scripting Support for our end user customers. Right now SDK Developer Support is only available for TAP members, (Select Level and above) We have been working with our friends in GSS and hope to have some good news for our customers this year. It has been long overdue.

#3. William (Lamw) will be the winner of some hard cold cash if no one else submits a script in our Script-O-Mania contest. The Script-O-Mania contest was launched before the break and William was our first and only contestants. Odds of winning are on his side.

#4. Project Onyx will take over our minds and force its will on the SDK / API marketing team. Project Onyx was developed by our PowerCLI development team with the goal to make developing, scripting using our APIs a little bit easier. This is very much a grass roots project and has gained an immense amount of popularity from our administrators and developers out there.

#5. I will find an iPhone app that will not only help me find my way home when lost, but will also open my garage door. This is more of a fun prediction. I lost my remote controlled garage door opener during VMworld Developer Day and I am waiting for someone to create a really useful application that will open my automatic garage door opener.

ESXi Chronicles: Learn Why Fulton Financial Chose ESXi Over ESX

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 18:22:00 +0000

We wanted to showcase another ESXi customer story.

Fulton Financial Corporation, a leading financial services organization, is currently running their entire virtual footprint on VMware ESXi, which includes 200 virtual machines running on 55 HP ProLiant BL465 blade servers. Fulton made the switch from VMware ESX to ESXi when they decided to upgrade to VMware vSphere 4. ESXi was a more attractive architecture to them due to its increased security, lower patching requirements, and ability to run on diskless servers.

“ESXi is architected so that it does not require local drives and is small enough to fit on a USB,” says Scott Armold, Engineering Manager at Fulton Financial Corporation. “We boot our ESXi images from USB keys and have gotten rid of our hard drives all together. The fact that the ESXi architecture does not include a traditional OS increases security—a paramount concern at Fulton and other financial institutions. “We like the idea of getting away from installing an OS,” says Armold. “Since ESXi doesn’t have one, that means it’s a safer hypervisor--more of a black box.”

Another significant benefit from the move from ESX to ESXi is the need for far fewer patches. “We were up to about 125 patches per quarter with ESX,” Armold reports. “Now that we’re running ESXi, I guess we do about three patches per quarter. So that’s made a huge difference for us.”

Armold’s team used the PowerCLI to automate their initial ESXi deployment. It took Armold and his team a week and a half to get their Windows PowerShell scripts written and tested for the migration. “We used the PowerCLI to write PowerShell scripts to automate our ESXi host configuration. It was easy to use and took us less than a week to write and test the script. We highly recommend it to other administrators looking to automate some aspects of their ESXi deployment.”

Read the full case study.

VMware Knowledge Base Weekly Digest: New articles published for week ending 01/17/2010

Mon, 18 Jan 2010 01:23:56 +0000

VMTN Blog: Top 5 Planet V12n blog posts week 02

Sun, 17 Jan 2010 20:25:49 +0000

It was a very exciting week as I announced that I will be transitioning to a new team. Of course that wasn't the only exciting thing this week. A lot of bloggers have been waiting for Eric Siebert to reveal the new Top 25 blogs... On twitter it was noticeable that some of the bloggers started to get nervous about their position. I am honored to be in such an amazing list. Anyway enough blabbering... check out the top 5:

Eric Siebert - And the winners of the top VMware/virtualization blog are…
Well I’m not saying, watch the presentation to find out, I’ll be doing another post later on with the full results as well as some detail on the process I used to sort through the votes and score them to determine the winners. Congratulations to all the winners, there were many newcomers to the top 25 blog roll. I’ll be sending you graphics that you can display on your website to reflect your achievements.
Simon Gallagher - Using the VCE/vBlock concept to aid disaster relief in situations like the Haiti Earthquake
Whilst providing physical, medical, food and engineering relief is of paramount importance during a crisis, communications networks are vital to co-ordinate efforts between agencies, it is likely that whatever civil communications infrastructure, cell towers, landlines etc. are badly impacted by the earthquake so aid agencies rely on radio based systems, however as in the “business as usual” world the Internet can act as a well-understood common medium for exchanging digital information and services – if you can get access.
Chris Hoff - Cloud: Over Subscription vs. Over Capacity – Two Different Things
This complicates things when you consider that at this point scaling out in CPU is easier to do than scaling out in the network. Add virtualization into the mix which drives big, flat, L2 networks as a design architecture layered with a control plane that is now (in the case of Cloud) mostly software driven, provisioned, orchestrated and implemented, and it’s no wonder that folks like Google, Amazon and Facebook are desparate for hugely dense, multi-terabit, wire speed L2 switching fabrics and could use 40 and 100Gb/s Ethernet today.
Scott Drummonds - Virtual Storage Design: Application Consolidation
Fixed recommendations for consolidation ratios are cancerous. Whether we are talking about vCPUs per core, virtual machines per host, or VMDKs per LUN, there is no single number the represents the “right” ratio. Accurate guidance requires workload characterization and fine tuning using vSphere’s performance counters. Today I want to highlight one experiment that shows application choice impacting VMDK-to-LUN consolidation. The inescapable conclusion is that sequential access data must be separated from random access files!
Scott Lowe - Resetting the Root Password on VMware ESX 4.0
Because this is a lab environment we just wanted to assign a simple password that anyone on the team could easily remember. (I’m sure the security purists out there are screaming right now.) Unfortunately, once I had the ESX host booted into single user mode, the passwd command insisted on making me use a complex password. There didn’t seem to be any simple way around the restriction.

VMware Networking Blog: VMware vSphere + Cisco Nexus 1000V bundles program extended in 2010

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 23:58:55 +0000

Ok, it’s not really technical, but definitely worth a short blog post.

When we released vSphere in May last year, we introduced some cut-price bundles that included the Cisco Nexus 1000V virtual switch. These ‘one stop shop’ bundles made it easier and cheaper for customers to adopt the Nexus 1000V as their virtual networking solution.

Last week we announced we’re continuing the bundle program. For more information, talk with your VMware account manager or reseller.

And, don’t forget … Release 1.2 of the Nexus 1000V is released and available. I wrote about it back on December 18.

VMware Networking Blog: VMXNET3 vs. VMXNET2 Performance Shootout

Fri, 15 Jan 2010 23:09:44 +0000

With vSphere 4, we introduced a new paravirtualized adapter—VMXNET3. This was designed from the ground up for high performance and supports a bunch of new features.

So how does it perform? One of our engineers pitched it against the previous generation—VMXNET2. VMXNET3 not only performs better (greater throughput on transmit and receive), but consumes less CPU. These results were most significant with a 10GigE NIC on Windows (Windows Server 2008 Enterprise). The results for IPv4 and IPv6 are shown in the graph below.

Windows 10GigE throughput (IPv4)

Windows10GigE throughput (IPv6)

The results are published in this paper posted on vmware.com. It will also appear on the Network Technology site (vmware.com/go/networking) in the coming week.

VMware ThinApp Blog: Step by Step Instructions on How to run Internet Explorer 6 on Windows 7

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 22:19:25 +0000

Here are instructions on how to package Internet Explorer 6 and make its engine run on Windows 7. This package utilizes Mozilla Firefox GUI and an add-on called IE Tab. With this configuration can you specify which URLs you want to render with the IE6 engine.

Requirements

A clean Windows 2000 with no Service Packs virtual machine image (verify that it has version 5.00.2920.0000 of Internet Explorer)
A clean Windows XP virtual machine image with Internet access
ThinApp version 4.0.4
Familiarization with instructions on how to virtualize a software product via ThinApp (see, "How to Make a ThinApp Application")
Downloaded Internet Explorer 6 SP1 installer
- Download ie6setup.exe from: http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=1e1550cb-5e5d-48f5-b02b-20b602228de6&DisplayLang=en
- Run ie6setup.exe /c:"ie6wzd.exe /d /s:""#E" to download the complete IE6 installation

Instructions on How to create a package containing Mozilla Firefox, IETabs and IE6.

1. Capture Internet Explorer 6

1.1 Start your W2K machine

1.2 Make sure you have a snapshot of your clean system before you continue

1.3 Copy the downloaded IE6 setup files to your image

1.4 Install ThinApp version 4.0.4

1.5 Run Setup Capture and do the pre installation snapshot

1.6 Run ie6setup.exe

1.7 Restart the machine when asked to

1.8 Perform the post installation snapshot

1.9 Activate Internet Explorer.exe, inetcpl.exe and cmd.exe Entry Points. Name the Primary Datacontainer and inventory name to something meaningful.

You do not need to use a separate container for the Read only data as I am doing with the .dat file in this example but for those not so experienced in tweaking ThinApp packages please use above settings.

1.10 Make sure you use Modified WriteCopy as your default file system Isolation Mode

1.11 Leave all the rest as defaults in the Setup Capture wizard

1.12 Copy the C:\Program Files\VMware\VMware ThinApp folder out of your Windows 2000 machine and revert the snapshot on your virtual machine. Copy the whole ThinApp folder will make it easier later on when we will merge our sandbox into the newly created package.

1.13 Verify that your package of IE6 will run successfully on the W2K machine at the same time as its locally installed IE5 is running. This just to make sure you have successfully captured IE6, if not there is absolute no point in carrying on.

1.14 Now you can shut down your W2K image since it will not be used any more during this package creation.

2. Merge Mozilla Firefox and IETabs into the IE6 package

2.1 Start your Windows XP machine

2.2 Make sure you have a snapshot of the clean state

2.3 Copy the VMware ThinApp folder to the root of your XP machines C drive. You folder structure should look like this:

2.4 Replace your current registry key files with these two:

Download HKEY_CURRENT_USER (delete -1 in its name)

Download HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE

2.5 Rebuild your project by simply double click on C:\VMware ThinApp\Captures\MozillaFirefox_IE6\build.bat.

2.6 Start the Internet Explorer Entry Point (C:\VMware ThinApp\Captures\MozillaFirefox_IE6\bin\Internet Explorer.exe) and browse to http://www.mozilla.com and click on the link to download the Mozilla Firefox setup. Make sure you choose Open and Run to launch the installation within the virtual environment of IE6.

2.7 I use all defaults during the Firefox setup

2.8 At the end of the Firefox installation launch Firefox and browse to https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/1419 and install IE Tab for Mozilla Firefox

Restart Firefox when asked to.

2.9 Within Firefox open the Tools – IE Tabs Options menu option

2.10 Add http://bcheck.scanit.be/bcheck/ to the Site Filter

Make sure you add all URLs you need to render with IE6 engine in this filter list.

2.11 Browse to http://bcheck.scanit.be/bcheck/ and verify that you are in fact rendering with IE6 engine and not Mozilla’s engine.

2.12 Shut down Mozilla Firefox and Internet Explorer if still running.

2.13 Start a command prompt outside the virtual environment

2.14 Standing in the project folder (C:\VMware ThinApp\Captures\MozillaFirefox_IE6) execute the "\VMware ThinApp\sbmerge.exe" apply command.

When sbmerge is done executing shut down the command prompt.

2.15 Open C:\VMware ThinApp\Captures\MozillaFirefox_IE6\Package.ini and add this to the end of it:

                [Mozilla Firefox.exe]
                Source=%ProgramFilesDir%\Mozilla Firefox\firefox.exe
                Shortcut=MozillaFirefox_IE6.dat
                WorkingDirectory=%ProgramFilesDir%\Mozilla Firefox
                ;Protocols=FirefoxURL;HTTP;HTTPS
                ;FileTypes=.htm.html
                Shortcuts=%Programs%

Protocols and FileTypes are disabled in this example but by simply deleting the semicolon your will associate these with the package if you register the package on your clients.

Close and save your package.ini file.

2.16 Rebuild your project by simply double click on C:\VMware ThinApp\Captures\MozillaFirefox_IE6\build.bat.

After the rebuild your bin folder should look like this:

3. Test run on Windows 7

Now is it time to copy the bin folder to your Windows 7 machine and launch the Mozilla Firefox.exe Entry Point. To verify functionality visit http://bcheck.scanit.be/bcheck/.

You should be able to run both the locally installed IE8 and the package simultaneously.

4. Epilogue

Now that it should be proven that IE6 engine is capable of running ThinApped on Windows 7 it is time to clean up the project. In this guide have I not mentioned any files that you could delete to save space and make the package into a good solid ThinApp package.
Please investigate your project folder and clean out what is not needed to run the application in your environment.
Obvious Folder Macros that you should be able to delete is:
            %Favorites%
            %History%
            %Internet Cache%
            %Profile%
            %SendTo%
            %drive_C%
            %Cookies%

This project has a couple of Entry Points and a separate Data Container. This can be changed and the whole project could be compiled into one single executable. Inetcpl.exe was activated so that you very easy can customize the settings of your Internet Explorer 6.

ESXi Chronicles: Learn Why and How to upgrade from ESX to ESXi

Thu, 14 Jan 2010 03:15:13 +0000

Visit the new VMware ESX to ESXi Upgrade Center to learn about the ESXi architecture and how to upgrade from ESX to ESXi. VMware ESXi is an operating system independent hypervisor, designed to improve hypervisor management in the areas of security, deployment and configuration, and ongoing administration. All VMware vSphere features are fully supported on ESXi. VMware vSphere customers that currently only deploy ESX are strongly encouraged to visit the ESX to ESXi Upgrade Center and begin planning their upgrade from ESX to ESXi.

VMware vSphere Blog: vSphere 4 Wins TechTarget's 2009 SearchServerVirtualization.com Product of the Year Award

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 23:21:23 +0000

Good stuff! You can read more about this here

VMTN Blog: Announcing Availability of VMware Go™ — The Quick and Easy On-Ramp to Virtualization

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 19:39:08 +0000

Today, VMware announced the general availability of VMware Go™, a free web-based service that lets users set up a virtual machine environment with just a few mouse clicks. We at VMware are very excited about this release, which directly addresses the skill barrier for starting down the virtualization path, especially for small businesses who may have limited IT resources. VMware Go guides users through the installation and configuration of the industry-leading hypervisor, VMware ESXi, and then enables them to set up and manage virtual machines running server application workloads. Since our public Beta of VMware Go was released in Sept, 2009, we’ve had over 1,000 users successfully set up an ESXi server and a total of 3,000+ VMs running on those servers.

How it works —Virtualization in Three Simple Steps:

Initial ESXi server setup
- Unique web-browser interface and intuitive wizard guides and accelerates installation and setup process
- Built in hardware compatibility check automates the process of selecting physical server environments
Virtual machine creation
- Leverage existing physical server configuration, install a prebuilt virtual appliance, or start with a new clean virtual machine.
Manage ESXi servers and virtual machines
- Centralized management interface simplifies changes to a virtual environment.
- Monitor virtual machines for basic performance and resource utilization.
- Scan and update virtual machines from a central console.

Useful links for more information:

· Learn more about VMware Go.

· Get started using ESXi and VMware Go.

· For more technical information of VMware Go, see the VMware Go FAQ.

· Video demo of VMware Go in action.

Posted by Joe Andrews, Group Manager, Product Marketing

VMware vSphere Blog: The vSphere Blogging Contest Continues - Let's Focus on ESXi!

Wed, 13 Jan 2010 17:08:33 +0000

Today starts our 8th cycle of the vSphere blogging contest and our focus for the next two weeks is ESXi. ESXi is built on VMware's next generation hypervisor architecture designed to improve hypervisor management in the areas of security, deployment and configuration, and ongoing administration.

See the all new ESX to ESXi upgrade center at http://www.vmware.com/products/vsphere/esxi-upgrade/

So get your blog entries in by midnight on 1/22.

VMware ThinApp Blog: Step by Step Instructions on How to ThinApp Newer Java Versions

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 23:23:24 +0000

Here are instructions on how to quickly and simply capture any newer versions of Java Runtime (1.4 and higher) for testing and working on within a ThinApp packaged application. These instructions will work whether Java is captured by itself or can be incorporated as a part of a larger multi-application installation.

For capturing Java 1.3 and lower packages...see the blog entry Step by Step instructions on How to ThinApp JAVA Runtime Version 1.3.1.20.

Requirements

A clean built VM with no other installations (see 'What do you mean by a "Clean PC"?').

Familiarization with instructions on how to virtualize a software product via ThinApp (see, "How to Make a ThinApp Application").

Your version of the JRE setup (see http://www.java.com - specifically the "All Java Downloads" section)

Instructions on How to ThinApp JAVA Runtime

These are the basic instruction you will need on How to ThinApp newer Java Runtimes.

1. Start with a clean Windows XP image only containing ThinApp Setup Capture

2. Launch ThinApp Setup Capture and create a pre-installation snapshot

3. Launch the Java Installation/Setup

NOTE: Select ALL OPTIONS to be installed (DO NOT USE INSTALL LATER/INSTALL ON FIRST USE)!

4. Run the post-installation snapshot in ThinApp Setup Capture.

5. Deselect all pre-checked Entry Points and select IEXPLORE as the entry point (NOTE: Will need to check SHOW ENTRY POINTS USED FOR DEBUGGING option.

6. For the Primary Data Container, type in JAVA.DAT or type in a Primary Data Container that suites you (see above image).

7. Continue through the Setup Capture wizard, setting your desired settings. Stop and set Default File System Isolation to WRITECOPY (see below image).

8. Modify the Package.INI file by clicking the Edit Package.ini button.

a. Edit the IEXPLORE.EXE Entry Point found at the bottom of the Package.INI file and add the following CommandLine option and value (bolded below).

[iexplore.exe]
Source=%ProgramFilesDir%\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe
Shortcut=JAVA.DAT
CommandLine=%ProgramFilesDir%\Internet Explorer\iexplore.exe "http://www.javatester.org"

b. Close and save the PACKAGE.INI mods.

10. Open the project folder (click "Open Project Folder" button)

a. Edit the text file HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.txt and add this key isolation at the top of the file.

isolation_full HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Browser Helper Objects

b. Edit the text file HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.txt and remove the RUN key and any registry entries beneath it (such as SunJavaUpdateSched and it's pertaining value).

isolation_full HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run

c. Close and Save the text file HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.txt.

d. Edit the text file HKEY_CURRENT_USER.txt and add this key isolation at the top of the file

isolation_full HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Classes\CLSID

e. Close and Save the text file HKEY_CURRENT_USER.txt.

f. Clean up the project by removing the following folders: NOTE: Make a backup first!

%Cookies%
%History%
%Internet Cache%

%SystemRoot%\Installer

%AppData%\Sun

%Program Files Common%\Java

g. Close the Project Folder

11. Click the Build button.

12. Once the Build process is completed, click the Finish button.

13. Copy out to a system where a different version of Java is already installed (ensure the JAVA.DAT file is next to IEXPLORE.EXE!).

14. Launch the Internet Explorer entry point and visit http://www.javatester.org/version.html to verify correct JRE version is seen by Internet Explorer.

The Console: VMware to acquire Zimbra

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 21:06:52 +0000

Posted by Steve Herrod
Chief Technology Officer

In August, I published a blog post explaining our acquisition of SpringSource, the popular open source Java development framework focused on simplifying the task of application development. Furthermore, we liked how SpringSource targets this application development simplicity for both on-premise and cloud deployment targets. Today I’m pleased to announce that we have entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Zimbra from Yahoo. While Zimbra’s domain is different than that of SpringSource, there are several commonalities in the acquisition rationale on how we will move forward with them in our fold.

First, a quick introduction… Zimbra provides open-source email, calendaring, and collaboration software for deployment within companies of all sizes (e.g. Bechtel, Digg, and Stanford), as well as to cloud and hosting providers offering mail services over the web (e.g. Comcast and NTT Communications). Yahoo! also continues to utilize Zimbra technology in its communications services, including Yahoo! Mail and Yahoo! Calendar. From a business perspective, Zimbra is one of the most popular collaboration software offerings, with more than 55,000,000 users and a subscriber base that is growing rapidly. And from a technology perspective, I like many things about the Zimbra offerings. First and foremost, the team is extremely motivated and talented. Furthermore, the products have really been soundly architected and are known for their outstanding scalability, elegant user interfaces, interesting mash-up creation capabilities (Zimlets), and administrative simplicity.

You may be thinking, “That’s great, Steve, but why is VMware acquiring them?”

There are two primary reasons for the acquisition:

Zimbra will further our mission of simplifying IT
Zimbra will add to the portfolio of offerings we provide our VMware vCloud™ partners

Let’s go into each of these in more detail:

Zimbra will further our mission of simplifying IT

VMware’s mission is to simplify IT, and every VMware product focuses on attacking the complexity and rigidity that has crept into this world. In many ways we see the excitement over cloud computing to be a longing for a simpler, more flexible way of doing computing. The VMware strategy is to help customers achieve cloud-like efficiency and operational improvements across the major IT infrastructure investment areas. To date this strategy has involved products and services targeting complexity in datacenter infrastructure (e.g. VMware vSphere™ and VMware vCenter™ Server), desktops (e.g. VMware View™ and VMware Fusion®), and application development (e.g. SpringSource, VMware Lab Manager, and VMware Workstation). With this acquisition, we will extend our focus into email and collaboration, one of the core services (along with areas such as file and print services and identity management) that IT departments universally provide to their users. All four of these technology areas are common to companies large and small. Furthermore, each area is taking growing amounts of IT attention, time, and money without furthering the ultimate goals of the company.

And how can VMware help simplify IT with the acquisition of Zimbra? We are initially focused on two key areas.

First, Zimbra was one of the more popular downloads on our virtual appliance marketplace. You can think of the virtual appliance marketplace as our version of iTunes, but for business applications. Virtual appliances are just virtual machines pre-populated with an operating system and applications that can be downloaded and easily started without installation and with minimal configuration. Once deployed onto VMware vSphere, the Zimbra virtual appliance will automatically benefit from the built-in VMware vSphere scalability, availability, and security services. We see this on-premise virtual appliance distribution and deployment model as a very simple yet effective approach for providing employees with collaboration capabilities, especially for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs). We’ve temporarily taken the existing Zimbra virtual appliance off the marketplace to spruce it up… stay tuned for a new version soon!

The second opportunity is around cloud-based email and collaboration services. As mentioned above, companies who wish to provide these services from an on-premise datacenter obtain a simple way to deploy and manage their offering. Other companies may choose to rent this service from a trusted cloud provider. Zimbra has already proven to be a popular and effective solution for many companies and individuals, and we plan to invest further in advancing its capabilities for this use case.

Zimbra will expand the portfolio of software that we can offer our VMware vCloud™ partners

This second motivation is very much related to the above point. We launched our VMware vCloud™ initiative just over a year ago to develop an ecosystem of telecom, hosting, and service providers that offer cloud solutions based on VMware technologies. This ecosystem has grown by leaps and bounds, quickly surpassing 1,000 members. Today we offer this ecosystem VMware vSphere-based compute and storage infrastructure upon which they can offer what is commonly referred to as “infrastructure-as-a-service” (IaaS). With the acquisition of SpringSource, we can enable our partners to offer a higher level of cloud-based service; one where programmers can write their code and let the cloud handle the details of how and where it runs. This is commonly referred to as “platform-as-a-service” (PaaS). And with Zimbra, we will now offer our partners an even higher level of cloud capability; one where customers can simply use an application without worrying about the details of how and where it runs. This top layer of the hierarchy is known as “software-as-a-service” (SaaS).

In this way, the outstanding Zimbra team and their technology will be an important element in expanding our VMware vCloud strategy to deliver a well integrated portfolio of compute, application development, and core IT service clouds. Furthermore, Zimbra is open source with a vibrant community, highlighting VMware’s belief in, and commitment to, the use of open platforms in the clouds.

And there’s one thing I’d like to address head-on. VMware vSphere is and will continue to be an outstanding platform for the deployment of Microsoft Exchange. We have heavily optimized our virtualization offerings specifically for the deployment of Microsoft Exchange, and thousands of companies are benefiting from the increased flexibility, availability, and security that comes from running Microsoft Exchange on top of VMware vSphere. We have some great material on these advantages available here.

So whether it is datacenters, desktops, application development, or core infrastructure applications, our mission will be to attack complexity and simplify IT. You’ll see much more from us in this space, so stay tuned! And I encourage you to check out the demo videos of Zimbra and also take a look at my new colleagues’ blog post on the acquisition as well.

VMware Knowledge Base Blog: The VMware Knowledegebase in 2010

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 14:55:47 +0000

A new year is upon us and as many of us do, it is perhaps a good time to reflect on some of the changes we've seen around here. The Knowledgebase saw a number of usability improvements over the year. Here are a few:

Fresh new look.
Alerts, which provide up-to-date information about important issues.
Answer Wizards, which walk you through common problems and suggest articles that may be helpful.
Expanded Actions box. The Actions box, located to the right of article content, provides an article's ID, last published date, and applicable products and versions. You can now also:
- Bookmark an article
- Copy the URL
- Email the article
- Print the Article
Star Rating System was improved.
Feedback box has been improved. These two feedback mechanisms help us improve our content by allowing you a say.

We have more improvements planned for 2010 that we're excited about. Keep an eye on this space for news.

VMware Education & Research News: VMAP Newsletter - Fall 2009

Tue, 12 Jan 2010 04:24:07 +0000

NEWS

VMAP Summit Fast Approaching

We are looking forward to seeing everyone who can join us in Big Sky, MT this year for our annual VMAP Summit. If you have missed the registration deadline, but would like to attend please be sure to contact us for availability information. Complete details can be found on our new VMAP Events portal.

The VMAP Free Licenses Product List Keeps Expanding

Member benefits keep growing with VMware Lab Manager being the latest addition to product licenses now available to our members. Lab Manager allows application owners, development, QA, and training teams to deploy, capture and share multi-tier application environments in seconds.

2009 Summer Intern Poster Session Winners Selected

August ended with a bang, as we held our ‘09 summer intern poster session. These poster sessions are truly an opportunity for students from our program member schools to shine. Interns each construct and present a poster that illustrate the projects they have been working on throughout the term. Posters are then voted on by employees and a poster committee. This year, we awarded the five winning interns with an all expenses paid trip to attend VMworld San Francisco! To find out about more about the winning posters and the interns who created them, please visit us here.

VMware’s IT Academy Booming

The VMware IT Academy Program now has 75 Instructor Led Training (ILT) academies that have been accepted along with 357 schools that have opted for the eLearning entitlement since the program’s inception in March of this year. Related courseware materials have been made available through GoVirtual.org by the VMware IT Academy Program and Education Services, such as the VI3 Overview (Complete Course) and will soon be adding the vSphere Overview course.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS & OTHER WORKS OF INTEREST

Virtual Machine Contracts for Datacenter and Cloud Computing Environments
Jeanna Matthews (Clarkson University/VMware, Inc.), Tal Garfinkel (Stanford University/VMware, Inc.), Christofer Hoff (Packetfilter), Jeff Wheeler (Cisco) Automated Control for Datacenters and Clouds (ACDC09), June 2009

Related works of interest being published at the upcoming SOSP conference in October (available post conference):

seL4: Formal Verification of an OS Kernel, Klein et al
Automatically Patching Errors in Deployed Software, Perkins et al
ODR: Output-Deterministic Replay for Multicore Debugging, Altekar et al
Detecting Large-Scale System Problem Detection by Mining Console Logs, Xu et al
Fast Byte-granularity Software Fault Isolation, Castro et al
Do You Have to Reproduce the Bug at the First Replay Attempt? PRES: Probabilistic Replay with Execution Sketching on Multiprocessors, Park et al

GOVIRTUAL

This quarter’s spotlight features SnowFlock: Rapid Virtual Machine Cloning for Cloud Computing by Andres Lagar-Cavilla, M.Sc., Ph.D. Candidate at the University of Toronto. This work won the Best Paper Award earlier this year at the Eurosys conference in Nuremburg, Germany.

Have a paper you'd like featured or know someone who should be featured in a future spotlight? Tell us!

New Materials Available for Download!

Complete vSphere Overview Course (lecture & lab book)

Chinese Translation of VMware Developed Syllabi (basic & introductory modules)

"The Science Behind Virtualization" (complete lecture set)

Using our courseware materials? We’d love to hear about your experience!

EVENTS & CONFERENCES

ACM Symposium on Operating System Principles (SOSP), Big Sky, MT (October 10^th-14^th)

3^rd Annual VMware Academic Program Summit to be co-located with SOSP (October 11^th)

A review of 2010 academic events & conferences is currently underway. We’ll continue to announce the details of our participation as they become available in following issues of the VMAP Newsletter.

Best,

The VMware Academic Program Team

VMware Knowledge Base Weekly Digest: New articles published for week ending 01/10/2010

Mon, 11 Jan 2010 01:02:08 +0000

VMTN Blog: Top 5 Planet V12n blog posts week 01

Sun, 10 Jan 2010 12:52:56 +0000

Another year, another week. Here we go again. Extremely busy week and announcements of companies acquiring other companies all over the place. Bloggers joining vendors or just changing jobroles. Crazy week, and same goes for the quality of the articles this week.

Steve Kaplan - Microsoft’s attempt to commoditize virtualization
Despite these many unique attributes, VMware's most compelling differentiator may be its astounding reliability. Unlike Hyper-V, it offers data center stability, performance and security that is independent from the bloat, reliability and patching issues of a general-purpose operating system. Even Redmond Magazine, "The Independent Voice of the Microsoft IT Community" gave its 2008 Editors Choice award for the most reliable IT technology to VMware ESX (the IBM mainframe came in #2).
Duncan Epping - esxtop values/thresholds!
I am a huge fan of esxtop! I read a couple of pages of the esxtop bible every day before I go to bed. Something I however am always struggling with is the “thresholds” of specific metrics. I fully understand that it is not black/white, performance is the perception of a user. There must be a certain threshold however. For instance it must be safe to say that when %RDY constantly exceeds the value of 20 it is very likely that the VM responds sluggish. I want to use this article to “define” these thresholds, but I need your help. There are many people reading these articles, together we must know at least a dozen metrics lets collect and document them with possible causes if known.
Martin MacLeod - Follow the moon, data center virtualization – a short essay
We introduced the world to server virtualization where instead of having a server per application, we could buy a server with a bit more memory, a bit more storage and have that ‘cut up’ and shared amongst the business units. It worked on the whole very well, but IT was still a bit confused and still is in many ways about how we charge for it and how we ‘make a profit’ for their cost center, you see we can only absorb so much before someone has to pay for the underlying infrastructure the 400TB of storage, the 32GB of RAM in each server, and compare that with the 1u special that might be good enough for a given application, keeping the per unit virtual machine cost competitive could be a challenge if we didn’t look at the way we billed for capacity, for delivering IT service.
Gabrie van Zanten - Putting your storage to the test – Part 2 NFS on Iomega IX4-200D
I was surprised to see so much difference in performance, I had expected some difference, but no difference as big as this. Looking at the data of the first “Super ATTO Clone pattern” test I ran, I can see the biggest difference between NFS and iSCSI being the short peak in read speed where iSCSI remained stable after reaching its peak performance at 41 MB/sec. NFS peaked to 110 MB/sec testing block sizes from 32K to 512K and dropped in speed to 57 MB/sec on blocks of 1M and larger.
Steve Chambers - Four economic variables and approaches to make your VDI solution successful
Put yourself in the shoes of a business manager: “Why should I pay Internal IT $250/qtr for a hosted desktop when I can buy physical for less/similar, or use a cloud offering?” The common response by Internal IT to this question is: “You HAVE to buy from us!” (footnote: even if we cost more and are worse). That kind of mandate might seem smart, but it’s a key indicator that Internal IT is losing the battle and has lost the war. If this is an Outsourcer saying this, then the writing is on the wall for them and I can 100% guarantee they are going to have to go through a tender at the end of their contract (expensive for outsourcer).

ESXi Chronicles: Enter Script-O-Mania, the VMware ESXi Scripting Contest, for a Chance to Win $2500!

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 21:48:59 +0000

VMware challenges you to build the best, most creative ESXi management scripts possible. The goal of the Script-O-Mania contest is to help our wider community adopt ESXi by providing useful, fun and powerful scripts to manage the ESXi platform. The best part is that we give our winners bragging rights and we put some hard cold cash in your pockets. Are you up for the challenge?

1st Place Prize: $2,500
2nd Place Prize: $1,000
3rd Place Prize: $500

Contest ends on March 15th 11:59 PM 2010 PST. Visit the Script-O-Mania page for more details.

VMware Networking Blog: Demystifying HP Flex-10 network mappings with vSphere

Fri, 08 Jan 2010 02:00:37 +0000

Confession: I haven’t had any first hand experience with the HP Flex-10 modules. However, I know from talking with a number of customers that there are a lot of them out there.

Kenneth Van Ditmarsch has written a fabulous blog article with the all important diagrams that depict the Flex-10 to vmnic mappings. If you’re stumped on how this stuff hangs together, then this should help you out.

VMware ThinApp Blog: ThinApp Troubleshooting - Repost

Thu, 07 Jan 2010 23:46:44 +0000

Since it was a bit hard to find, I figured I would repost this section of the much larger blog article (linked here and at the bottom of this article) where we discuss application troubleshooting. The larger article (Application Troubleshooting Tools and Tips for VMware ThinApp) has many other good tidbits but we often get asked these specific items - hence the repost.

Often times we hear the app works but starts up slowly. The first thing to help you here is this; does it start slowly the first time ONLY or does it start slowly each and every time. Remembering the application is creating, building, and extracting contents to the sandbox a little more so the first time it executes, we can assume that if the application only runs slow the first time, it must be something which is being extracted, created, built, or otherwise dumped to the sandbox.

Regardless of this, here are some additional items to check:

Services are starting up. It could be the case the services are not needed – if so, disable the services either in the ThinApp Project registry (HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE.TXT file) or set the AutoStartServices=0 BuildOption in the PACKAGE.INI. If the services are needed and they are taking a long time to launch, test the services start/stop times on a native Windows clean VM and see if the same thing happens there. If so, a call to the app manufacturer is in order.
Example: Office will load and set the Machine Debug Manager (MDM.EXE) service and CTFMON.EXE services to auto-start. These are not necessarily needed to launch a ThinApp'ed version of Office and can usually be disabled.
Fonts being extracted on the fly to the sandbox during initial startup. Look for a %FONTS% folder in the sandbox and copy it into the ThinApp project. Rebuild the ThinApp project and retest this.
Awaiting numerous fonts to be loaded. Sometimes an app will load every font it can find. In this scenario, it might be wise to remove all but the necessary fonts from the %FONTS% folder in the ThinApp Project and install them natively to the Windows host.
Auto-repair functions. Most apps will auto-repair themselves when they detect something incorrectly configured – and sometimes ThinApp will cause this if isolation or other settings are not properly configured in the ThinApp package. Look for things like the MSIEXEC.EXE process/service running (attempt to stop if possible) and other app-specific auto-repair functions or processes. Seeing these run may indicate a misconfigured application and often times kick off an auto-repair of the application without even showing this process to the user executing the application (ThinApp’ed or not).
Excessive package size. If the ThinApp project is excessive in size (there is no specific size here - it's specific to what the environment can handle), it can take longer to load depending upon how the application works and loads itself, and - of course - the environment it is running on. Remove unnecessary items from the ThinApp project before building. Typically items such as the following can be removed from a project (MAKE A BACKUP OF THE PROJECT FIRST!):

%SYSTEMROOT%\INSTALLER — The contents of this folder will likely contain some MSI files – these MSI files can usually be removed if they are not needed.
%APPDATA%, %LOCAL APPDATA%, and %PROFILE% -- Since these folders are all part of the user’s “profile”, if the application is installed to the entire system (meaning, anyone can login to the specific system the app is installed on and launch the app), then the contents of these folders are not typically needed unless it is desired to package the customer user configuration information with the application.
%PROGRAMFILESDIR%\<app folder>\<app backup folder> -- Sometimes an application will install a backup of itself into a subfolder of the %ProgramFilesDir%\App folder. This is typically for auto-repair functionality as well, much like the %SYSTEMROOT%\INSTALLER folder contents are for repairing the app.
Example: Adobe products (depending upon the product and the version of the product) will often store a complete backup of the installation source code in %PROGRAMFILESDIR%\ADOBE\<Product>\Setup Files. Sometimes it's hidden in %PROGRAMFILESDIR%\ADOBE\ADOBEPATCHFILES as well. So...it boils down to "Know Thine App"!
%COOKIES%, %HISTORY%, and %INTERNET EXPLORER CACHE% -- Unless actually capturing an IE application or an IE plugin/addon, these folders may not be needed for your specific application, and thus the entire folder can be removed.

To reiterate, all of this and much, much more can be found on the previous ThinApp Blog Article Application Troubleshooting Tools and Tips for VMware ThinApp.