Virtualization on The IT Hollow

VMware Cloud on AWS Firewalls Overview

Wed, 28 Nov 2018 16:03:46 +0000

If you’re getting started with VMware Cloud on AWS then you should be aware of all the points in which you can block traffic with a firewall. Or, if you look at it another way, the places where you might need to create allow rules for traffic to traverse your cloud. This post is used to show where those choke points live both within your VMware Cloud on AWS SDDC, as well as the Amazon VPC in which your SDDC lives.

VMware Discovery

Mon, 30 Oct 2017 14:20:38 +0000

VMware has been busy over the last year trying to re-invent themselves with more focus on cloud. With that they’ve added some new SaaS products that can be used to help manage your cloud environments and provide some additional governance IT departments. Cloud makes things very simple to deploy and often eliminates the resource request phases that usually slow down provisioning. But once you start using the cloud, you can pretty quickly lose track of the resources that you’ve deployed, and now are paying for on a monthly basis, so it’s important to have good visibility and management of those resources.

NSX Issues After Replacing VMware Self-Signed Certs

Mon, 13 Mar 2017 14:05:58 +0000

Recently, I’ve been going through and updating my lab so that I’m all up to date with the latest technology. As part of this process, I’ve updated my certificates so that all of my URLs have the nice trusted green logo on them. Oh yeah, and because it’s more secure.

I updated my vSphere lab to version 6.5 and moved to the vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) as part of my updates. However, after I replaced the default self-signed certificates I had a few new problems. Specifically, after the update, NSX wouldn’t connect to the lookup service. This is particularly annoying because as I found out later, if I’d have just left my self-signed certificates in tact, I would never have had to deal with this. I thought that I was doing the right thing for security, but VMware made it more painful for me to do the right thing. I’m hoping this gets more focus soon from VMware.

Determine the Number of vSphere Clusters to Use

Mon, 13 Jun 2016 14:15:10 +0000

The number of clusters that should be used for a vSphere environment comes up for every vSphere design. The number of clusters that should be used isn’t a standard number and should be evaluated based on several factors.

Number of Hosts

Let’s start with the basics, if the design calls for more virtual machines than can fit into a single cluster, then it’s obvious that multiple clusters must be used. The same is true for a design that calls for more hosts that can fit into a single cluster or any other cluster maximums.

AWS Cloud Formation Templates in vRealize Automation

Mon, 14 Mar 2016 14:15:46 +0000

Amazon has a pretty cool service that allows you to create a template for an entire set of infrastructure. This isn’t a template for a virtual machine, or even a series of virtual machines, but a whole environment. You can create a template with servers, security groups, networks and even PaaS services like their relational database service (RDS). Hey, in today’s world, infrastructure as code is the direction things are going and AWS has a pretty good solution for that already.

vRealize Automation 7 - Deploy NSX Blueprints

Wed, 09 Mar 2016 15:10:20 +0000

In the previous post we went over how to get the basics configured for NSX and vRealize Automation integration. In this post we’ll build a blueprint and deploy it! Let’s jump right in and get started.

Blueprint Designer

Login to your vRA tenant and click on the Design Tab. Create a new blueprint just like we have done in the past posts. This time when you are creating your blueprint, click the NSX Settings tab and select the Transport zone. I’ve also added a reservation policy that can help define with reservations are available for this blueprint.

vRealize Automation 7 - NSX Initial Setup

Mon, 07 Mar 2016 15:01:03 +0000

Its time to think about deploying our networks through vRA. Deploying servers are cool, but deploying three tiered applications in different networks is cooler. So lets add VMware NSX to our cloud portal and get cracking.

The first step is to have NSX up and running in your vSphere environment. Once this simple task is complete, a Distributed Logical Router should be deployed with an Uplink interface configured. The diagram below explains what needs to be setup in vSphere prior to doing any configurations in vRealize Automation. A Distributed Logical Router with a single uplink to an Edge Services Gateway should be configured first, then any new networks will be built through the vRealize Automation integration. While the section of the diagram that is manual, will remain roughly the same throughout, the section handled by vRealize Automation will change often, based on the workloads that are deployed. Note: be sure to setup some routing between your Provider Edge and the DLR so that you can reach the new networks that vRA creates.

vRealize Automation 7 – XaaS Blueprints

Mon, 29 Feb 2016 15:03:07 +0000

XaaS isn’t a made up term, well maybe it is, but it supposed to stand for “Anything as a Service.” vRealize Automation will allow you to publish vRO workflows in the service catalog. This means that you can publish just about any thing you can think of, and not just server blueprints. If you have a workflow that can order your coffee and have it delivered to you, then you can publish it in your vRA service catalog. Side note, if you have that workflow, please share it with the rest of us.

vRealize Automation 7 - Load Balancer Rules

Wed, 24 Feb 2016 15:15:32 +0000

In a previous post we went over installing an Enterprise Install of vRealize Automation behind a load balancer. This install required us to setup a Load Balancer with three VIPs but also required that we only had one active member in each VIP. A load balancer with a single member doesn’t really balance much load does it?

After the installation is done, some modifications need to be made on the Load Balancer. The instructions on this can be found in the official vRealize Automation Load Balancing Configuration Guide if you want to learn more. There are several examples on how to setup load balancing on an F5 load balancer and NSX for example. This post will focus on a KEMP load balancer which is free for vExperts and it will all be shown through with GUI examples.

vRealize Automation 7 – Enterprise Install

Mon, 22 Feb 2016 15:09:48 +0000

OK, You’ve done a vRealize Automation 7 simple install and have the basics down. Now it’s time to put your grown up pants on, and get an enterprise install done. This is a pretty long process, so be ready, but trust me, this is much better in version 7 than in the past.

Load Balancer

To start with, you will want to configure your load balancer. An enterprise install means that you’ll want at least two of each type of service so that you can protect yourself from a failure. There are three Virtual IPs (VIPs) that should be created prior to starting your install. The table below lists an example list of VIPs with their associated members and ports.

vRealize Automation 7 – Custom Actions

Mon, 15 Feb 2016 15:31:16 +0000

We’ve deployed a virtual machine from a vRA blueprint, but we still have to manage that machine. One of the cool things we can do with vRealize Automation 7 is to add a custom action. This takes the virtual machine object and runs a vRealize Orchestration blueprint against that input. We call these actions “Day 2 Operations” since they happen post provisioning.

To create a new custom resource action go to the Design Tab –> Design –> Resource Actions. Click the “New” button to add a new action.

vRealize Automation 7 - Custom Properties

Wed, 10 Feb 2016 15:09:39 +0000

Custom Properties are used to control aspects of machines that users are able to provision. For example, memory and CPU are required information that are necessary for users to deploy a VM from a blueprint. Custom properties can be assigned to a blueprint or reservation to control how memory and CPU should be configured.

Custom properties are really powerful attributes that can vastly change how a machine behaves. I like to think of custom properties as the “Windows Registry” of vRealize Automation. Changing one property can have a huge effect on deployments.

vRealize Automation 7 – Subscriptions

Mon, 08 Feb 2016 15:05:14 +0000

In vRealize Automation 7 a new concept was introduced called a “Subscription.” A subscription is a way to allow you to execute a vRealize Orchestrator workflow based on some sort of event that has taken place in vRA. Simple idea huh? Well some of you might be thinking to yourself, “Yeah, this is called a stub, Duh!” The truth is that stubs are still available in vRealize Automation 7 but are clearly being phased out and we should stop using them soon because they are likely to not be around in future versions. The idea of an event subscription is a lot like a stub when in the context of machine provisioning, but there are a lot more events that can be triggered than the stubs that have been around in previous versions. Let’s take a look.

vRealize Automation 7 – Manage Catalog Items

Tue, 02 Feb 2016 15:05:37 +0000

You’ve created your blueprints and entitled users to use them. How do we get them to show up in our service catalog? How do we make them look pretty and organized? For that, we need to look at managing catalog items.

Log in as a tenant administrator and go to the Administration Tab –> Catalog Management –> Catalog Items. From here, we’ll need to look for the blueprint that we’ve previously published. Click on the blueprint.

vRealize Automation 7 – Entitlements

Mon, 01 Feb 2016 15:01:13 +0000

An entitlement is how we assign users a set of catalog items. Each of these entitlements can be managed by the business group manager or a tenant administrator can manage entitlements for all business groups in their tenant.

To create a new entitlement go to Administration tab –> Catalog Management –> Entitlements. Click the “New” button to add a new entitlement.

Under the General tab, enter a name for the entitlement and a description. Change the status to “Active” and select a Business Group. Note: If only a single business group has been created, this will not be selectable since it will default to the only available group. Then select the users who will be part of this entitlement.

vRealize Automation 7 – Blueprints

Thu, 28 Jan 2016 15:10:13 +0000

Blueprints are arguably the thing you’ll spend most of your operational time dealing with in vRealize Automation. We’ve finally gotten most of the setup done so that we can publish our vSphere templates in vRA.

To create a blueprint in vRealize Automation 7 go to the “Design” tab. Note: If you’re missing this tab, be sure you added yourself to the custom group with permissions like we did in a previous post, and that you’ve logged back into the portal after doing so.

vRealize Automation 7 – Custom Groups

Thu, 28 Jan 2016 15:05:40 +0000

If you’ve been reading the whole series of posts on vRealize Automation 7, then you’ll know that we’ve already been setting up roles in our cloud portal, but we’re not done yet. If you need any permissions besides just requesting a blueprint, you’ll need to be added to a custom group first.

To create a custom group, login as a tenant administrator and go to the Administration Tab –> Users and Groups –> Custom Groups. From there click the “New” button to add a new custom group.

vRealize Automation 7 – Services

Tue, 26 Jan 2016 15:05:21 +0000

Services might be a poor name for this feature of vRealize Automation 7. When I think of a service, I think of some sort of activity that is being provided but in the case of vRA a service is little more than a category or type. For example, I could have a service called “Private Cloud” and put all of my vSphere blueprints in it and another one called “Public Cloud” and put all of my AWS blueprints in it. In the screenshot below you can see the services in a catalog. If you highlight the “All Services” service, it will show you all blueprints regardless of their service category. Otherwise, selecting a specific service will show you only the blueprints in that category.

vRealize Automation 7 – Reservations

Mon, 25 Jan 2016 15:16:53 +0000

vRealize Automation 7 uses the concept of reservations to grant a percentage of fabric group resources to a business group. To add a reservation go to Infrastructure –> Reservations. Click the “New” button to add a reservation and then select the type of reservation to be added. Since I’m using a vSphere Cluster, I selected Virtual –> vCenter. Depending on what kind of reservations you’ve selected, the next few screens may be different, but I’m assuming many people will use vSphere so I’ve chosen this for my example.

vRealize Automation 7 – Business Groups

Thu, 21 Jan 2016 15:15:27 +0000

The job of a business group is to associate a set of resources with a set of users. Think of it this way, your development team and your production managers likely need to deploy machines to different sets of servers. I should mention that a business group doesn’t do this by itself. Instead it is combined with a reservation which we’ll discuss in the next post. But before we can build those out, lets setup our business groups as well as machine prefixes.

vRealize Automation 7 – Fabric Groups

Tue, 19 Jan 2016 15:09:39 +0000

In the last post we setup an vCenter endpoint that defines how our vRealize Automation solution will talk to our vSphere environment. Now we must create a fabric group. Fabric Groups are a way of segmenting our endpoints into different types of resources or to separate them by intent. These groups are mandatory before you can build anything so don’t think that since you don’t need to segment your resources, that you can get away with not creating one.

vRealize Automation 7 – Endpoints

Mon, 18 Jan 2016 15:06:46 +0000

Now that we’ve setup our new tenant, lets login as an infrastructure admin and start assigning some resources that we can use. To do this we need to start by adding an endpoint. An endpoint is anything that vRA uses to complete it’s provisioning processes. This could be a public cloud resource such as Amazon Web Services, an external orchestrator appliance, or a private cloud hosted by Hyper-V or vSphere.

vRealize Automation 7 – Create Tenants

Thu, 14 Jan 2016 16:10:08 +0000

Now it’s time to create a new tenant in our vRealize Automation portal. Let’s login to the portal as the system administrator account as we have before. Click the Tenants tab and then click the “New” button.

Give the new tenant a name and a description. Then enter a URL name. This name will be appended to this string: https://[vraappliance.domain.name]/vcac/org/ and will be the URL that users will login to. In my example the url is https://vra7.hollow.local/vcac/org/labtenant. Click “Submit and Next”.

vRealize Automation 7 - Authentication

Wed, 13 Jan 2016 15:03:15 +0000

In order to setup Active Directory Integrated Authentication, we must login to our default tenant again but this time as our “Tenant Administrator” (we setup in the previous post) instead of the system administrator account that is created during initial setup.

Once you’re logged in, click the Administration tab –> Directories Management –> Directories and then click the “Add Directory” button. Give the directory a descriptive name like the name of the ad domain for example. Then select the type of directory. I’ve chosen the “Active Directory (Integrated Windows Authentication)” option. This will add the vRA appliance to the AD Domain and use the computer account for authentication. Note: you must setup Active Directory in the default (vsphere.local) tenant before it can be used in the subtenants.

vRealize Automation 7 - Base Setup

Tue, 12 Jan 2016 15:07:46 +0000

We’ve got vRA installed and thats a good start. Our next step is to login to the portal and start doing some configuration. Go to https://vra-appliance-name-orIP and enter the administrator login that you specified during your install. Unlike prior versions of vRealize Automation, no domain vsphere.local domain suffix is required to login.

To start, Lets add some local users to our vSphere.local tenant. Click on the vsphere.local tenant.

Click on the “Local users” tab and then click the “New” button to add a local account. I’ve created a vraadmin account that will be a local account only used to manage the default tenant configurations.

vRealize Automation 7 Guide

Mon, 11 Jan 2016 15:45:35 +0000

If following the posts in order, this guide should help you setup vRealize Automation 7 from start to finish. This is a getting started guide that will hopefully get you on the right path, answer any questions you might have, and give you tips on deploying your own cloud management portal.

Part 1 - Simple Installation

Part 2 -Base Setup

Part 3 - Authentication

Part 4 - Tenants

Part 5 - Endpoints

Part 6 - Fabric Groups

Part 7 - Business Groups

Part 8 - Reservations

Part 9 - Services

Part 10 - Custom Groups

Part 11 - Blueprints

Part 12 - Entitlements

Part 13 - Manage Catalog Items

Part 14 - Event Subscriptions

Part 15 - Custom Properties

Part 16 - XaaS Blueprints

Part 17 - Resource Actions

Part 18 - Enterprise Install

Part 19 - Load Balancer Settings

Part 20 - NSX Initial Setup

Part 21 - NSX Blueprints

Part 22 - Code Stream and Jenkins Setup

Part 23 - Code Stream and Artifactory Setup

Part 24 - Add Custom Items to vRA7

Part 25 - Upgrade vRA from 7.1 to 7.2

Part 26 - Adding an Azure Endpoint

Part 27 - Installing vRealize Code Stream for IT DevOps

Part 28 - Configuring Endpoints for vRealize Code Stream for IT DevOps

Part 29 - Using vRealize Code Stream for IT DevOps

Part 30 - Unit Testing with vRealize Code Stream for IT DevOps

Part 31 - Containers on vRealize Automation

Part 32 - vRA 7.3 Component Profiles

Part 33 - vRA 7.5 Upgrade

If you’re looking for a getting started video, check out this P luralsight course for a quick leg up on vRA 7.

vRealize Automation 7 Simple Installation

Mon, 11 Jan 2016 15:00:21 +0000

This is our first stop in our journey to install vRealize Automation 7 and all of it’s new features. This post starts with the setup of the environment and assumes that you’ve deployed a vRealize Automation appliance from an OVA and that you’ve also got a Windows Server deployed so that we can install the IAAS components on it.

After you’ve deployed the vRA7 OVA, login to the appliance with the root login and password supplied during your OVA deployment.

Veeam Package for vRealize Orchestrator

Mon, 07 Dec 2015 15:00:10 +0000

Veeam is a popular backup product for virtualized environments but who wants to spend their days adding and removing machines to backup jobs?

Now available on github is a Veeam package for vRealize Orchestrator. This is my gift to you, just in time for the Hollow-days.

Available Features

The following features are available with the plugin for it’s initial release.

Add a VM to an existing backup job
Remove a VM from a backup job
Start a backup job immediately
Add a Build Profile to vRealize Automation
Add a VM to a backup job from vRA
Remove a VM from a backup job from vRA

Some additional functionality could easily be added to your environment using the existing worfklows such as start a backup as a Day 2 operation in vRA, or change backup jobs etc. The world is your oyster.

Create a Day 2 Operations Wrapper

Mon, 16 Nov 2015 15:08:30 +0000

Just deploying virtual machines in an automated fashion is probably the most important piece of a cloud management platform, but you still need to be able to manage the machines after they’ve been deployed. In order to add more functionality to the portal, we can create post deployment “actions” that act on our virtual machine. For instance an action that snapshots a virtual machine would be a good one. We refer to these actions that take place after the provisioning process a “Day 2 Operation”, probably because it’s likely to happen on the second day or later. Clever huh?

vRealize Automation 6 with NSX - Initial Setup of NSX

Mon, 12 Oct 2015 14:00:22 +0000

Before we can start deploying environments with automated network segments, we need to do some basic setup of the NSX environment.

NSX Manager Setup

It should be obvious that you need to setup NSX Manager, deploy controllers and do some host preparation. These are basic setup procedures just to use NSX even without vRealize Automation in the middle of things, but just as a quick review:

Install NSX Manager and deploy NSX Controller Nodes

NSX Manager setup can be deployed from an OVA and then you must register the NSX Manager with vCenter. After this is complete, deploy three NSX Controller nodes to configure your logical constructs.

vRealize Automation and vCloud Air Integration

Mon, 21 Sep 2015 14:07:42 +0000

vRealize Automation is at its best when it can leverage multiple infrastructures to provide a hybrid cloud infrastructure. One of the things we might want to do is to set up VMware vCloud Air integration with your vRA instance.

To start, we need to have a vCloud Air account which you can currently sign up for with some initial credits to get you started for free. Once you’ve got an account you’ll be able to setup a VDC and will have some catalogs that you can build VMs from. If you’re concerned about these steps, don’t worry a default VDC including some storage and a network will be there for you by default.

vRealize Automation Infoblox Integration

Tue, 04 Aug 2015 01:47:59 +0000

Infoblox is a pretty popular IP Address Management (IPAM) solution for many shops. Wouldn’t it be nice to integrate your automation solution such as vRealize Automation, with your existing IPAM system? Well, don’t worry. You can!

Infoblox Setup

This post isn’t going to go into great detail about the setup of the Infoblox appliance but we do need to make sure that we’re licensed for API usage correctly. Ensure that the infoblox appliance has the “Cloud Network Automation” license applied to it. This is an easy thing to check. If your appliance has the “Cloud” tab, then the license is enabled.

VCDX Vision Quest and Mea Culpa

Mon, 20 Jul 2015 14:07:44 +0000

Long is the way and hard, that out of hell leads up to light - Milton

Apparently, Milton has been through the VCDX process. It is a challenge that will test your resolve and you will probably learn a lot along the way. You’ll also be glad when its over.

I’ve been good at many things in my life, but never felt like I was great at anything. I’ve succeeded at most things I’ve attempted, but the VCDX was a goal I truly didn’t think I was capable of achieving. Chris Colotti mentioned in one of his posts that you need to decide why you’re going for the VCDX in the first place. In my case, I was doing it to prove to myself that I could do it. The process really taught me something about myself that I didn’t know. It was my own personal Vision Quest. (Queue Lunatic Fringe them song here)

vRealize Automation 6 - Post Provisioning Workflows on AWS

Mon, 15 Jun 2015 13:33:40 +0000

In order to deploy a fully provisioned automated deployment of a server we have to look past just deploying a virtual machine OS and configuring an IP Address. In order to get something usable we also need to configure the server with some applications or make post provisioning changes. For instance we might want to install Apache after deploying a Linux machine. In vRealize Automation deployments invoke a post-provisioning stub to call vRealize Orchestrator workflows to make additional changes. This works very well on a vSphere environment since we can leverage VMtools to access the guest OS. But if you’ve ever deployed an instance in Amazon EC2 you’ll know that this isn’t quite as easy. EC2 instances don’t have VMTools to allow us into the guest OS. To make matters worse, the current version of vRealize Automation doesn’t pass the IP address of the guest Operating System to vRO. See this KB article from VMware for more information.

AWS Linux Guest Access via vRealize Orchestrator

Mon, 08 Jun 2015 13:27:55 +0000

It may be necessary to connect to a Linux Guest thats that been provisioned in Amazon Web Services so that you can perform additional operations on it. One of the ways you might want to configure your instances is through vRealize Orchestrator. One of the hang ups with using vRealize Orchestrator to connect to your Linux EC2 instances is that you’ll need an SSH key to connect. This post shows you how you can do this.

VMware Custom Searches

Mon, 01 Jun 2015 14:07:34 +0000

OK, I know that most of the known world is all of a sudden working on making everything scriptable so that it can be automated or just run from a command line, but come on we still use the GUI for some quick tasks don’t we?

One of the cool things about the vSphere Web Client is its ability to create a custom search based on a set of criteria. Just to recap, I said there was a cool feature of the vSphere Web Client.

vRealize Automation - Remove UPN Suffix

Tue, 26 May 2015 13:01:13 +0000

Have you ever tried logging into vRealize Automation and gotten an Incorrect username/password but you’re positive you typed everything in correctly? You try again and find out that if you put the User Principal Name suffix everything works fine. If you’re using a solution like vRealize Automation and notice the login doesn’t work unless you specify a a User Principle Name (UPN) in the form of username@domain.name, try the following correction.

vPostgres for vRealize Automation Gotcha

Tue, 21 Apr 2015 13:45:15 +0000

If you’re planning on doing a full distributed installation of vRealize Automation, you’ll likely want to have some protection for the vPostgres database. Having a single point of failure defeats the purpose of doing a full distributed install. I’ve been doing a bunch of work on this lately and wanted to warn people of a gotcha if you’re using a load balancer.

Non-Distributed Install

To give us a better understanding, take a look at a pair of vRealize Automation Appliances that aren’t in a high availability solution. In the picture below, there are two vRealize Automation Appliances and each of them is communicating with their own embedded vPostgres Database. This is the default configuration when deployed from VMware and works just fine.

vRealize Automation vPostgres Failover

Mon, 13 Apr 2015 14:15:41 +0000

Clustering the vPostgres database is an important part of a fully distributed vRealize Automation install. The simple install only requires a single vRealize Appliance and an IaaS Server, but the fully distributed install requires many additional pieces including load balancers to ensure both high availability as well as handling extra load placed by users. The vPostgres database is included with the vRealize Automation appliances, but for a full distributed install, these must be modified so that there is an active and standby vPostgres database running on them. The primary vPostgres database will replicate to a standby read-only database.

Custom Options for vRealize Automation Server Requests

Mon, 30 Mar 2015 13:42:16 +0000

vRealize Automation is a great way to allow teams to deploy virtual machines and manage them throughout their entire lifecycle. You can control exactly where you want the machines deployed and the processes that must happen in order to meet company guidelines. Sometimes, you’d like to give some additional options to the end user when they deploy a machine. To do this, we can use a custom property.

Build a Property in the Property Dictionary

To start, lets build a new property in the property dictionary. To do this, go to the Infrastructure Tab –> Blueprints –> Property Dictionary. From there, we can add a “New Property Definition”. In the example below I’ve created a very generic “HollowTestProperty” and left the display name the same. A description is always a good idea and the Control Type I changed to “DropDownList”. This will mean that we can enter a series of values to be selected by the end user at the time of the request. Be sure to click the green check mark to save the entry.

VMware Tools Time Syncronization

Tue, 24 Mar 2015 14:14:33 +0000

VMware Tools gives you the option to synchronize the time of the guest OS with the ESXi host. Many times this isn’t necessary because the guest itself is using Network Time Protocol (NTP) or used the Active Directory domain time.

Why would proper time synchronization be a problem, you might ask? Well, in a virtual environment, the CPU isn’t constantly keeping track of time like it does in a physical machine. For a more detailed explanation look at tick counting in the Timekeeping Guide.

Move a vApp Between Clusters

Mon, 23 Feb 2015 14:00:14 +0000

I recently made some changes to my home lab and had to create a new Cluster because of my EVC mode when I was faced with migrating my vC Ops vApp to the new cluster. I moved the hosts over, but the vApp wouldn’t go with them like the virtual machines did.

vAppMigrate1

My first attempt was to export the vApp to an OVF file and reimport it to the new cluster which failed with an error.

vSphere 6.0 Announced

Mon, 02 Feb 2015 22:00:59 +0000

vSphere 6.0 is now available and there are some great new enhancements with the new version. Here are some of the many highlights from today’s announcement.

Speeds and Feeds

As with the new version of anything things are bigger and faster. vSphere 6.0 is no exception.

64 hosts per cluster, up from 32
8000 Virtual Machines per Cluster, up from 4000
480 CPUs, up from 320 CPUs
12 TB RAM, up from 4 TB (if someone has 12 TB of RAM in a box, please let me know how long it takes to do a memory check. vSphere 7 might be out by then.
1000 Virtual Machines per host, up from 512 Virtual Machines

Virtual Machine Hardware version 11 allows for:

SRM Troubleshooting

Tue, 27 Jan 2015 14:56:41 +0000

Unfortunately, not all software is perfect and from time to time I’ve run into issues with SRM as well. This post is a list of items I often see during SRM deployments and some information to troubleshoot issues.

Log File Locations

SRM Logs: c:programDataVMwareVMware vCenter Site Recovery ManagerLogs

Installation logs: %USERPROFILE%Application DataVMwareVMware Site Recovery ManagerLogs

Storage Replication Adapater Logs: This depends on the SRA Vendor, but try program filesSRANAME to start with

SRM 5.8 now with Automation!

Mon, 19 Jan 2015 14:15:24 +0000

SRM version 5.8 now is now extensible with vRealize Orchestrator (formerly vCenter Orchestrator). This new functionality was expected since the vRealize Suite is all about automation and disaster recovery certainly needs to be taken into consideration.

One pain point I’ve seen with SRM has been the ongoing administration of protection groups. Every time a virtual machine is deployed to a protected datastore, the VM also has to be configured for protection. This usually only consists of right clicking the virtual machine and choosing “configure protection” but is also another thing that administrators have too keep track of.

SRM 5.8 Guide

Mon, 05 Jan 2015 15:00:29 +0000

This is a Site Recovery Manager 5.8 Guide to help understand the design, installation, operation and architecture of setting up VMware SRM 5.8

SRM 5.8 Architecture

SRM 5.8 Installation

SRM 5.8 Upgrade from SRM 5.5

SRM 5.8 Site Setup

SRM 5.8 Array Based Replication

SRM 5.8 Protection Groups

SRM 5.8 Recovery Plan

SRM 5.8 IP Customization

SRM 5.8 Customizing your Recovery Plan

SRM 5.8 Test Recovery

SRM 5.8 Failover Recovery

SRM 5.8 with Automation

SRM 5.8 Alarms

SRM 5.8 Troubleshooting

Official Documentation Links

Site Recovery Manager 5.8 Documentation Center

Site Recovery Manager 5.8 Compatibility Matrix

Site Recovery Manager 5.8 Release Notes

Site Recovery Manager 5.8 vCO Plug-in Download

Site Recovery Manager 5.8 Download

Site Recovery Manager 5.8 Storage Replication Adapters

Additional Resources

If you want some great resources to continue learning VMware Site Recovery Manager, I suggest checking out these resources:

VMware SSL Automation Tool - Error Generating pfx

Mon, 29 Dec 2014 16:13:20 +0000

During the process of setting up a new vCenter Server in my lab, I ran into an issue adding SSL Certificates to my vCenter services. I followed my own blog posts about how to do this so that I wouldn’t miss anything, but nevertheless ran into an error that took me quite a while to get fixed.

After creating all my certificate requests using the VMware SSL Automation Tool, I updated my SSO with my custom certificate without issue. The next step is to make sure the Inventory Service trusts the new SSO Certificate, which also went without a hitch.

vRealize Automation 6.2 Upgrade

Tue, 16 Dec 2014 14:56:53 +0000

Upgrades for the vRealize Automation software (formerly vCloud Automation Center) seem to be coming quite often these days. This post gives a quick overview on how to upgrade your current environment to the latest release. Of course for official documentation, please check out VMware’s documentation for details. vRealize Upgrade Instructions

Pre-Install Steps

Obviously you should ensure that you’ve got backups in the event something catastrophic should occur. Be sure to grab a backup of the IaaS database, and snapshot your vRA appliances, as well as any of the servers running the IaaS components such as the Model Manager, DEM Workers, Orchestrators and Agents. For this guide, we have a vRA appliance, and a single IaaS Server running the rest of the components. A separate SQL Server is housing the database.

Before You Start PowerShell

Mon, 08 Dec 2014 14:21:36 +0000

PowerShell is an amazing tool that has limitless potential for Administrators, Engineers and Architects to automate routine tasks or do reporting on things their system management applications aren’t built for. Whenever there is a task to be done on multiple systems and it might need to be done more than once, I find myself reaching for this valuable tool.

The problem with PowerShell, just like a programming language is that it can be intimidating to get started. This post is to give you a basic understanding of what you’ll be getting into before you start running PowerShell cmdlets.

A Sense of Community

Mon, 13 Oct 2014 13:28:24 +0000

I was asked by a coworker, why I blog. He asked, “Why would you spend the time writing, when people have official documentation to use?” His point was that it’s silly to write how-to articles about things that are already officially documented by a vendor. To further his curiosity, he wanted to know why I would post things that could possibly get me into trouble if I’m posting negative things or incorrect information.

Cloning Nested ESXi in Workstation

Mon, 06 Oct 2014 14:41:04 +0000

I recently had to rebuild part of my home lab due to a very poor decision to host all of my nested ESXi hosts on a single SSD. Kids, Do NOT do that at home! Obviously this is a lab and budget was a constraint, but it was a bummer when my SSD finally failed. It might be useful to review some steps used to build ESXi Servers inside VMware Workstation. Especially since Workstation 10 can clone ESXi which makes things much quicker.

Free Bandwidth Monitoring

Mon, 29 Sep 2014 13:01:30 +0000

When I work with smaller sized customers, I often hear that they don’t have any networking monitoring software available. Usually there is some server monitoring there, and something that pings network devices, but nothing that can display how much bandwidth is being used, and when.

If you are in this situation, I implore you to check out PRTG monitor from Paessler. This is a great piece of software, that can do much more than monitor your Internet bandwidth, but that’s what I use it the most for. There is a full version, but the free version will allow you to monitor up to 10 ports which is plenty if you’re just monitoring your WAN, or a few ports like your ESXi hosts in your home lab!

A Microsoft Guy Converted to Apple

Tue, 23 Sep 2014 13:34:18 +0000

I never thought that I’d be writing this post, but the day has come where I decided to switch to an Apple laptop. If you’ve known me, you were probably aware of my disdain for Apple products. I was of the opinion that they are offering the same equipment with a higher price tag and people who purchased that stuff were suckers. So now, either I’ve been snookered into this mass hysteria of Mac Madness, or things aren’t really how I originally thought.

Add SSL Certificate to VMware vCOps

Tue, 02 Sep 2014 13:15:42 +0000

In this day and age, almost all the programs we interact with are web pages. Many of the applications we deploy end up having a web front end and are configured with a default SSL Certificate. It’s much more secure to have your own trusted certificate and in previous posts I’ve gone over how to setup the Public Key Infrastructure (PKI) in a home lab, as well as deploying Web Certificate Templates for our applications.

Tech Field Day Extra

Wed, 20 Aug 2014 13:15:38 +0000

Hey! You got your VMworld in my Tech Field Day!

The makers of Tech Field Day are having an “Extra” set of sessions at VMworld 2014 this year in San Francisco.

As you may already know, the Tech Field Day group gets together a set of delegates to engage with some vendors about a variety of solutions. These discussions are all streamed live, as well as posted for later viewing. The discussions are to be technical in nature and can be directed in a much different path than a normal “set” presentation.

Replacing VMware vCenter SSL Certificates

Mon, 18 Aug 2014 13:30:58 +0000

Congratulations, if you’ve made it this far, you’re almost done with the replacing of your VMware SSL Certificates! If you’ve followed the previous posts, you’ll know that this has been a long path to completing your goal. This post finishes installing those certificates on your vCenter server. If you missed a part please check out the previous posts to get caught up.

Create a Home Lab Certificate Authority Deploy Root Certificates via Autoenrollment Create VMware-SSL Web Certificate Template Create VMware Services Certificate Requests

Create VMware SSL Certificate Requests

Thu, 14 Aug 2014 13:20:47 +0000

I’ve seen quite a few VMware environments where when you login, you get that silly error message about a certificate not being trusted. This is something we can fix and more importantly be sure that the connections are trusted and encrypted.

Prerequisites

Trusted root certificates deployed to workstations - Instructions for Lab Environment
Web-Certificate Template Deployed - Instructions for Lab Environment
Certificate Authority Web Enrollment server - (If you followed the Lab Environment setup this should be on your CA already)
Download OpenSSL and install it. I used 1.01h as the version for my lab which worked fine on a Server 2012 R2 Server which is also my vCenter Server.
Download and install the vCenter Certificate Automation Tool from VMware. This is also found in the vCenter install media for vSphere 5.5.

I prefer to create my certificate requests right from the VMware vCenter Server, so I install both the SSL Automation Tool and OpenSSL directly on the vCenter Server. If you’re using the VMware vCenter Server Appliance you’ll need to do this someplace else and there are some additional steps not listed in this post. Please see this KB article for more info: vCSA SSL Certs

Create VMware SSL Web Certificate

Mon, 11 Aug 2014 13:05:30 +0000

In order to replace our VMware SSL Certifactes, we need to create a web certificate template that we can then reuse to deploy all of the individual service certificates like vCenter, SSO, Update Manager, vCenter Orchestrator, etc. This certificate will be issued on the vCenter Server and requested in a later process.

In part one of this series, we installed a certificate authority.

In part two of this series, we deployed client authentication certificates to all our workstations and servers.

Setup Home Lab SSL Root Certificates

Thu, 07 Aug 2014 13:52:44 +0000

Home Lab SSL Certificates aren’t exactly a high priority for most people, but they are something you might want to play with before you get into a production environment. In part one of this series, I went over installing an Enterprise Root CA just to get us up and running. Again, be aware that for a production environment you should use an Offline Root CA and a Subordinate CA, but we’re in a lab and don’t need the additional layer of security.

Setup Home Lab SSL Certificate Authority

Mon, 04 Aug 2014 13:15:58 +0000

If you would like to setup SSL certificates for your home lab, this guide should get you to a minimal installation. The goal of this post is to show you a basic way to setup certificates and should not be followed verbatim if you are planning a production deployment. For one thing, this post uses an Enterprise Root Certificate Authority and in a production environment you really should have an offline Root CA and an online Subordinate CA for security purposes.

Trouble Configuring the vCAC appliance

Mon, 28 Jul 2014 13:05:39 +0000

I thought it was necessary to get this post out. I’ve heard numerous people say that they’ve tried to install VMware’s vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) but for one reason or another it just didn’t seem to work. I myself recently installed this and had issues, but somehow got it to install correctly on the third try. If you’ve had trouble configuring the vCAC appliance then look for the tip below.

Know Heads from Tails about Linux

Mon, 21 Jul 2014 13:26:20 +0000

There are a few Linux commands that vSphere Administrators should know for basic troubleshooting purposes and I wanted to take a second to review them in case you’ve typically been a Windows Administrator (like me).

First, traversing the Linux file system is pretty similar to going through Windows directories from the command line.

change directories

Windows : CD C:dirname

Linux : cd /dirname

Show files and folders

Windows : dir

Get VMtools with PowerCLI 5.5 R2

Mon, 14 Jul 2014 13:01:45 +0000

VMtools is one of those nagging little pieces of software that always seems to be a pain to update. Back in my System Administration days, I commonly needed to report on which VMs had different versions of VMtools, and I have to admit, this was a more difficult property to find from my PowerCLI toolkit.

Take a look at the old way of finding my VMtools versions through PowerCLI.

VMware Drive Type Changer

Mon, 07 Jul 2014 13:33:09 +0000

There are a ton of features now that VMware has that may require either an SSD or a Non-SSD to be available in your ESXi host. Host Caching requires an SSD and Partner products like PernixData also require an SSD to be available on the host. VMware’s Virtual SAN (VSAN) currently require both an SSD and a Non-SSD to be available.

I’ve seen that many people want to try out these products in a lab environment, but don’t want to go out and buy another disk just to familiarize themselves with the product. In these cases, you can fool ESXi into thinking there is a device of the type you want. This can be done by using the esxcli commands on the host as documented here on VMware’s site.

Dynamically Assigned Static IP Addresses...Huh?

Mon, 30 Jun 2014 16:08:12 +0000

After a long day of working with Microsoft’s IPAM feature, I found that it might be possible to deploy my virtual servers with a static IP Address without going to look up an IP from an Excel spreadsheet or some other log.

OK, let’s address the elephant in the room first. I know that there is this thing called DHCP and that I can already automatically assign an IP addresss, but with that solution, my IP Address could change from time to time. Typically, I create a DHCP Scope for servers that I’m just testing out, or need some dummy VMs with IP Addresses. This way I don’t have to worry about looking up stuff before deploying a VM that I’m going to destroy again shortly afterwards. I also use DHCP for PC’s, where I almost never care about the IP Address.

Test Connections from an ESXi Host Using vmkping

Mon, 23 Jun 2014 16:19:10 +0000

If you’ve been in a situation where you need to test connectivity, you’ve probably used the ping command. But what do you do when you’re trying to test connectivity from an ESXi host? Luckily there is a command called vmkping that will allow you to test from the host.

The first thing that you need to do is to SSH into your ESXi host. Turn the SSH Service on from the Configuration –> Security Profile Tab. Then you can use your favorite ssh client and remote into your host.

VMware Log Insight 2.0

Mon, 16 Jun 2014 14:30:34 +0000

VMware just announced their 2.0 version of Log Insight last week and for a logging product, it’s pretty cool. Let’s face it, most of us don’t get up every morning and rush to our computer to check out the newest logging software on the market, but VMware Log Insight is still neat.

Installation

The VMware Log Insight 2.0 product was shockingly easy to install for log management system. In my experience, logging software makes you jump through so many hoops that you need to be a Parkour Ninja to do successfully, and some of which I would consider to be a " Cold Butter IT Solution", but not in this case. The install comes in the form of an OVA and I won’t go through that process, but it’s very simple.

Cold Butter IT Solutions

Mon, 09 Jun 2014 13:16:06 +0000

The other day I was making a grilled cheese sandwich for my son and it got me thinking. The process of making one of these delicious morsels was similar to some of the IT solutions that I had worked with in the past. Let me explain.

First and foremost, lets define the objective. The goal was to have a tasty grilled cheese sandwich for lunch. This is not a difficult process and the steps are also fairly straight forward.

It's time to start thinking Ahead!

Thu, 22 May 2014 12:53:44 +0000

For the past year I’ve been working as a Vice President for a startup consulting company that deals with distressed assets. Think debt collections type stuff. My role involved managing projects, providing technical consultations about things like PCI-DSS, HIPAA and infrastructure design. While this position was certainly challenging in its own ways, it was time for me to make a change. I’m very excited to be joining the team at Ahead. Ahead is a consulting company in downtown Chicago that offers a variety of services for IT delivery.

Out of your Comfort Zone

Mon, 19 May 2014 13:03:52 +0000

I was recently approached to present the Keynote session for a few VMUG conferences and wanted to provide a perspective about the experience.

Public Speaking is clearly not one of my top 10 things I’d like to spend my time doing. Being a Systems Engineer, I don’t mind explaining things to a small group of people, but for the most part am a pretty quiet and reserved person who would prefer to stay in the shadows. Don’t get me wrong, if asked to weigh in, I have had no problem providing feedback or participate in a conversation, especially if it’s something I’m knowledgeable about, but for the most part, I’m pretty shy.

vCNS Edge SSL VPN

Tue, 13 May 2014 14:00:14 +0000

A secured, remote connection to your data is a requirement for almost all network designs these days. Mobility, telecommuting and late night help desk calls have created an environment that needs to have access to the local network in a secure fashion. vCNS Edge can provide these services to your virtual infrastructure.

In previous posts, I’ve walked through installing vCNS Manager and installing vCNS Edge appliances. These are prerequisites to setting up SSL VPN on the VMware vCloud Network and Security appliance..

No More Data Plane Administrators

Tue, 22 Apr 2014 14:05:17 +0000

There are two terms used in IT that are often used in conjunction when learning about how technologies are built. These two terms are “Control Plane” and “Data Plane”. A quick and dirty definition of these two terms would be:

Control Plane - The decision making part of any system. Usually considered the brains of the system.
Data Plane - The part of a system that carries out an operation. This would be the routine tasks needed to make the system work.

Just as a sidebar, if you are looking for me to site my source on those definitions you’re out of luck. These are my basic definitions that I’ve made up for purposes of this post. If for some reason these definitions become common place, then I want some royalties. :)

vCNS Edge Network Address Translation

Tue, 15 Apr 2014 14:43:12 +0000

VMware vCloud Networking and Security (vCNS) can provide Network Address Translation (NAT) services from the vCNS Edge appliance.

There are two types of NAT that the edge appliance can provide.

Destination NAT (DNAT) is used to provide access to a private IP Address from a (usually) public IP Address for incoming traffic.
Source NAT (SNAT) is used to translate a private IP Address into a (usually) public IP Address for outgoing traffic. This type of NAT can also be called “masquerading”. (It’s a subtle difference that we won’t go into in this post.)

vCNS Edge DHCP

Thu, 10 Apr 2014 13:38:41 +0000

One of the most basic tasks that happens on a network is assigning IP Addresses. Once a VMware vCNS Edge appliance has been deployed, you can now hand out IP address through Dynamic Host Control Protocol (DHCP).

In previous posts, I’ve walked through installing vCNS Manager and installing vCNS Edge appliances. These are prerequisites to setting up DHCP on the VMware vCloud Network and Security appliance.

vCNS Edge DHCP Setup

Log into your vShield Manager and click on the Datacenter. Click the “Network Virtualization” Tab where you’ll find the Edge appliance you’ve already deployed. Go to Actions and click “Manage”.

Deploy vCNS Edge

Mon, 07 Apr 2014 13:32:07 +0000

vCloud Networking and Security has the capabilities to provide edge services inside of your virtual environment. Edge firewalls, network address translation, DHCP, routing are all things that vCNS Edge can do for you. This post goes into the steps necessary to deploy vCNS Edge.

I should mention that vCNS and the previous name vShield may be used interchangeably in this article.

Logical Diagram

The picture below is a diagram of what our environment will look like when we’re done. We have production VMs as you might expect, and our new vCNS Edge VM. We’ve also got our new Edge network and a Shielded VM which will not be connected to the production vSwitch directly.

Sony MDS-X10 Giveaway courtesy of Veeam

Mon, 31 Mar 2014 13:12:39 +0000

We’ll be giving away a pair of the Sony MDR-X10 headphones courtesy of Veeam. If you’re in the market for a stylish set of shiny new headphones and don’t want to shell out hard earned cash for them, this is your lucky day.

During the vsphere-land.com top virtualization blog contest I was fortunate enough to win a pair of these to give away on my site. Here is how you can win a pair of these headphones for yourself.

Website Badges for Top 50 vsphere-land Bloggers -2014

Thu, 27 Mar 2014 15:15:35 +0000

Each year Eric Siebert at vsphere-land.com has a voting process where you can cast your ballot for your favorite virtualization blogs. He lists those blogs on his vlaunchpad site if you’re curious to see who made the list.

Luckily again this year my friends over at whateverinspires.com were kind enough to provide a logo for any bloggers who made this prestigious list. This year there are Gold, Silver, and Bronze badges depending on your status. If you made the list, please feel free to download the image and use it on your site.

vShield Endpoint - Trend Micro Deep Security (Part 1)

Mon, 24 Mar 2014 13:03:24 +0000

If you’re a vSphere Administrator and have compliance regulations to deal with, vShield Endpoint might save you a lot of hassle. From my own experience with PCI-DSS, it was important to limit the cardholder data environment scope. The fewer devices that touch credit card data, the fewer items that had to be protected. In the same breath, it was important to have Anti-Virus, malware protection, firewall rules and file integrity monitoring. vShield Endpoint allows for all of these things to be handled in a single package. This post looks specifically at Trend Micro’s Deep Security Product.

vShield Endpoint - Trend Micro Deep Security (Part 2)

Mon, 24 Mar 2014 13:02:02 +0000

In the first post in this series, we deployed the vShield Endpoint host driver and installed the Trend Micro Deep Security Manager on a Windows VM.

Trend Micro Deep Security Appliance Deployment

First, we need to login to the Deep Security Manager which is conveniently accessed as a web page. Go the the DNS name of the Manager that you entered during the setup wizard in part 1 of this series. Log in with the username and password that you specified.

vShield Endpoint - Trend Micro Deep Security (Part 3)

Mon, 24 Mar 2014 13:01:49 +0000

The first parts of this series focused mainly on how to install the Trend Micro Deep Security product and how to prepare your environment. This post shows you a bit more of what can be accomplished with the product.

vShield Endpoint Part 1 vSheidl Endpoint Part 2

Policies

This is the guts of the product. All the configurations you’ve done up to this point have been leading up to a solution that can help secure your environment and possibly make it comply with a regulatory body.

Getting started with vCNS

Mon, 17 Mar 2014 14:07:03 +0000

VMware has a very nice solution for managing network access between virtual machines. In a physical environment, blocking access between servers would require routing network traffic through a firewall. This might mean several vlans, subnets and routes. Luckily now that many infrastructures are virtual we have an alternative. vCloud Networking and Security (vCNS) is a solution that can be used to block traffic between virtual machines.

vCNS can be a bit intimidating so this is a quick, getting started, guide on how you can test it out in your environment.

Virtualization Field Day 3 Twitter Statistics

Mon, 10 Mar 2014 13:05:38 +0000

When there is a big event that I’m affiliated with, I like to do some quick analysis on the twitter statistics, just to put things into some perspective. For this query, we’ve looked at all tweets with the hashtag #VFD3 from March 5th - 7th specifically. This should take into account most of the Virtualization Field Day 3 Twitter Statistics.

Enjoy. Oh and some of you tweet WAAAAAY to much. :)

Virtualization Field Day 3 Live Stream

Wed, 05 Mar 2014 17:30:42 +0000

Watch the Virtualization FIeld Day 3 Sessions live!

Please feel free to check out the live stream and live tweets from the event.

www.techfieldday.com Tweets about “#VFD3”

vCenter HA Datastore Heartbeats

Mon, 03 Mar 2014 15:00:02 +0000

High Availability is a great reason to virtualize your servers. It can help reduce downtime by automatically rebooting virtual machines in the case of a host failure. But, a relatively minor host issue should not cause the reboot of all of your virtual machines. This is where vCenter HA datastore heartbeats are useful. Let’s first look at a basic example of HA. Below is our normal environment with no failures. We have a few VMs on each host and the hosts are connected to a pair of datastores and a network switch. Now assume we have a host failure, we now need to have HA kick in and reboot the virtual machines on the failed host, over on the still working hosts. HA is working great and is a great feature, but lets take a look at what happens if the Management network were to fail. Without datastore heartbeats involved, the two hosts wouldn’t be able to communicate with each other over the network so the two of them would assume that the other was failed. But by looking at the example below we can see that even though the Management network is down, the virtual machines and their network is working just fine. This means that no outages are being noticed by end users so we DON’T want HA to kick in because the virtual machines will restart.

2014 Virtualization Blog Voting Now Open

Thu, 27 Feb 2014 11:40:06 +0000

Every year Eric Seibert puts together a list of the top virtualization blogs on his site vsphere-land.com. This year there are about 300 different sites to vote for including theITHollow.com! Last year, this site was reaching a year old and was voted number 49 on the list of top 50 blogs. This was a great feeling, knowing the amazing content that is out on the web, and I appreciate everyone who voted.

HP OneView Initial Thoughts

Mon, 24 Feb 2014 14:37:44 +0000

HP Recently announced OneView which looks to be poised to manage their converged infrastructure, and datacenter products. As the name might suggest it can be used to manage all your HP products from one console. One of the things that grabbed me was that it is deployed to a vSphere environment with an OVA file which makes it super easy to deploy. In the past some of the HP Management tools like Insight Control required a whole slew of prerequisites before the product could actually be installed. Once that was installed, there was a tedious process of configuring it with all of your network devices and if you didn’t configure them in the right order, they wouldn’t relate to each other correctly.

Virtualization Field Day 3

Mon, 17 Feb 2014 13:31:42 +0000

I’m am very excited and honored to be voted in as a delegate for the Virtualization Field Day 3 event in Silicon Valley on March 5th through the 7th.

This is an event that gets a group of independent delegates together and reviews, provides feedback and comments on different types of technology that are entering or shaping the virtualization segment of the Information Technology industry. Great companies with new products can come and give demonstrations on their solutions. If they have merit these delegates will likely tout how impressive they are through their social media channels, but if they have deficiencies are likely to point them out.

PernixData FVP 1.5 Beta

Tue, 28 Jan 2014 14:50:50 +0000

Good news for all of you eagerly awaiting the next iteration of the PernixData FVP software. Version 1.5 is now in Beta and you can request the download for your own testing from the following link http://info.pernixdata.com/Betaprogram.

Disclosure: At the time of this writing I am a PernixPro which entitles me to early access to software, licenses or other merchandise. The thoughts expressed in this post are my own and have not been vetted by PernixData.

2013 Thank You

Mon, 30 Dec 2013 16:00:05 +0000

It has been an exciting year and I wanted to take a second to thank the sponsors of theITHollow.com. Maintaining a blog and putting out new content on a regular basis is a time-consuming activity and also costs money. Luckily, I’ve got some great sponsors and I look forward to working with them again next year.

Thank you to:

Also a BIG THANK YOU to Erik and Carolyn Schonsett for the awesome graphics on my site. If you’d like to see more of their work, or need graphics of your own, check out:

Cloud Physics has cards forfrom everyone

Mon, 09 Dec 2013 14:02:37 +0000

Cloud Physics generated a lot of buzz during the 2012 VMworld in San Francisco. I remember them sharing a booth with Fusion-IO and having a large crowd most of the time. They had a little different idea about how to get viability into vSphere environments and it was through the concept of cards.

The Installation of Cloud Physics may be one of the simplest ever done.

1. Go to the CloudPhysics site and sign up for their service. (There is a 30 day free trial available as well).

Zerto for Disaster Recovery

Mon, 02 Dec 2013 14:01:46 +0000

As many of you know I’ve been a fan of the VMware Product called Site Recovery Manager (SRM) for a disaster recovery solution, I even wrote an SRM 5.5 Guide for using it.

But many people I talked to told me to check out Zerto as a DR solution because of how simple it was to use and setup. I figured that I owed it to them to at least try them out, and so they are now in my lab.

Maxta out of Stealth Mode

Wed, 13 Nov 2013 14:16:29 +0000

I recently had the opportunity to check out a new product called Maxta. If you’re not familiar with the company yet, that’s ok as it’s just now hitting the market with some vigor.

The Generally Available (GA) version of Maxta is a software-centric solution that make the most out of storage all ready available on your servers.

Maxta takes local storage on your ESXi hosts and creates a VMware datastore out of it. At first glance it’s hard not to immediately compare it to VMware new VSAN solution that is coming soon. Aside from the fact that Maxta is available right now, there are some other major differences.

End User VMware Console with PowerCLI

Mon, 11 Nov 2013 14:33:18 +0000

After watching Alan Renouf’s video about Open-VMConsoleWindow, I got excited about PowerShell again. In my current job I don’t get to do much scripting anymore but wanted to give building a form for PowerCLI a try. I’ve secretly wanted to be a programmer as long as I didn’t have to do it full time. :)

Using the video from Alan, and a Video from the LazyWinAdmin (included in this post) I created a fairly simple form that could run some commands on my home lab. My main goal was get a refresher on some PowerCLI and how to use Primal Forms.

VMworld EU 2013 Twitter Statistics

Tue, 22 Oct 2013 12:55:11 +0000

I was asked to provide some twitter statistics for VMworld -Barcelona like I did for the VMworld San Francisco this year.

Here were the results

#VMWorld

Tweets by time of day are as of US Central timezone. This is why there are so many at 2am. Central time is -7 hours behind Barcelona.

Most Mentions

Tweet Map

#vExpert

Most Mentions

#VCDX

VMware Fault Tolerance (FT)

Mon, 21 Oct 2013 13:00:53 +0000

I think the Olsen twins have been using FT longer than VMware has.

Awesome! So you’ve got your brand new shiny VMware cluster all setup with HA and think, “Man, I’m in great shape now. Downtime is a thing of the past!”.

Well, not so fast! VMware High Availability just means that if a physical host fails, the virtual machines can reboot on another host which LIMITS your downtime. What if your machines are so critical that you can’t have this reboot time in the case of a host failure? The answer might be VMware Fault Tolerance (FT).

VMware vCOps 5.8 Announced

Tue, 15 Oct 2013 08:00:30 +0000

Today, VMware announced the new and much improved VMware vCenter Operations Management 5.8.

The new features of 5.8 are poised to make this version of vCOps much more useful to hybrid environments that use both ESXi and Hyper-V, or hybrid cloud environments that utilize vCloud Director and Amazon Web Services.

Extensibilty

VMware has taken the approach that vCOps needs to be able to change quickly so that multiple types of platforms can be monitored from a the application. Being able to quickly handle different types of environments will likely increase the adoption of a VMware application, but it’s good for everyone.

Chicago VMUG User Conference Oct 22nd

Wed, 09 Oct 2013 13:59:20 +0000

The annual Chicago VMUG Users Conference will be held on Tuesday October 22nd and you will not want to miss this one. With the recent announcements at VMworld, this will be a great opportunity to learn about the new offerings that will affect the industry. Oh, and by the way, there is an opportunity to win a brand new VMware home lab valued at $4000.

Jay Cuthrell is a thought leader within the Office of the CTO at VCE (A company formed by Cisco and EMC with investments from VMware, and Intel) working with service providers, systems integrators, ISVs, and media & entertainment companies to deliver converged infrastructure. He is a frequent industry speaker currently based on the West Coast of the United States. Previously, as a strategic technology consultant with cuthrell.com he worked with service providers, startup companies, and investment groups in addition to writing for ReadWrite and Telecompetitor. He has held CTO, VP, and GM roles at Digitel and NeoNova (an Azure Capital and Bridgescale Partners portfolio company) and infrastructure consulting roles working domestically and internationally for Fortune 500 clients. He also served at Scient (formerly iXL now Publicis), Nortel, Analysts International, IBM, and NCSU College of Engineering. He holds a BS in Materials Science and Engineering from North Carolina State University and grew up in Beaufort, NC. His blog can be found at fudge.org

VMware 5.5 Upgrade Tips

Tue, 24 Sep 2013 13:44:54 +0000

vSphere 5.5 went GA on Sept 22nd 2013. If you’re ready to upgrade your home or work environment, here are some suggestions:

Upgrade order

1. Take a Backup! You want to have a backup of your vCenter database in case the unthinkable happens. You will probably want to backup your SSL certificate folder as well. It can be located here: %ALLUSERSPROFILE%VMWareVMware VirtualCenter

It may also be worth your time to save an updated host profile so that you can re-apply it if needed after your upgrade. Perhaps your host upgrade fails and you re-install from scratch. Now you’ve got all your configs that can be re-applied quickly.

Windows Server 2012 as a Storage Device for vSphere Home Lab

Tue, 24 Sep 2013 13:30:39 +0000

If you’ve got a some hardware lying around for your lab, Windows Server 2012 may be a great solution for a home storage device. You can now do both block (iSCSI) and NAS (NFS) on the same server, as well as having an OS to install some management apps on it. In my lab, I use this management server to run Veeam for my backups, PRTG network monitor for bandwidth tracking, as well as using this server for both iSCSI targets and NFS mounts.

Windows 8.1 review

Tue, 17 Sep 2013 13:30:37 +0000

Windows 8.1 is set to be released on October 17th but the Release Preview is available for download and testing as of right now.

Some of the biggest criticisms of Windows 8 was the new MetroUI and lack of a start menu. Windows 8.1 isn’t abandoning these new features, but have tweaked them up a bit to make them slightly more user friendly. While Windows 8 may great for a tablet, normal PC users have been frustrated with the learning curve.

VMworld 2013 Recap

Wed, 04 Sep 2013 14:40:40 +0000

VMworld 2013 is now over and its time for a rundown of what went on during this years show. As always, this is THE event that virtualization junkies must attend.

This year there was no shortage of things to do. Keynotes, Hands on Labs, Solutions Exchange, VMware Education Services, Blogger hang out, parties, meetings and social gatherings. I wear a Jawbone UP device that tracks my steps and it was not uncommon to hit 20,000 steps each day. Reminders for anyone going next year, that comfortable footwear is a must.

VMworld twitter statistics

Mon, 02 Sep 2013 14:06:50 +0000

I’ve been interested in using twitter’s API to do some analytic analysis of things lately. If you’re interested in this as well, there are several sites that can help you do you’re own queries, or use the Microsoft Office analytic tool. Here are some interesting stats about VMworld.

#VMWORLD stats

#vExpert Stats

I also thought it might be worth looking at where the vExperts call home (assuming geolocation was turned on and accurate, Yes, I’m talking to you Josh Andrews)

VMware VSAN

Thu, 29 Aug 2013 16:23:27 +0000

VMware announced their new product called VSAN this week at VMworld in San Francisco CA. The VSAN is a new offering that will allow customers to provision “shared” storage by using locally direct attached disks. Traditionally, in order to use the features like vMotion, customers had to have an external NAS or SAN device to house the virtual machines. VMware isn’t abandoning the idea of SAN or NAS, but they now have a lower cost offering that can help smaller businesses get more out of their capital investment. Consider disaster recovery scenarios where a company might not want to spend the upfront cost of a SAN that may never (hopefully) be used. This will allow a basic DR plan with less cost.

vSphere 5.5 announced

Tue, 27 Aug 2013 01:59:19 +0000

This week at VMworld 2013, VMware’s CEO Pat Gelsinger announced the new features of vSphere 5.5. The entire list of updates can be found in the " What’s New?" file from VMware but here are some of the highlights.

Single Sign on was completely re-written. I would bet that the #1 reason that users didn’t adopt vSphere 5.1 release was due to issues with single sign on. VMware re-wrote this code not only fix the bugs, but make the entire experience better. This feature was a necessity for VMware to move forward with the vSphere platform.
Additional GPU Support. This may be a big deal for some companies who are afraid to switch to a VDI infrastructure because of limited graphics processors.
62 TB VMDK’s now supported. Bigger is always better… right? This could be a very big deal. I know several clients who got into a jam when they created their 2TB vmdks only to find out that they couldn’t snapshot them or expand the disks any further. 62TBs should suffice for now! :)
Flash Read Cache. VMware now natively supports using SSD’s as read cache for specific VMDK files. In the past vSphere could use local SSDs for host cache. This was used to mitigate the issue of swapping to disk. If you have to swap to disk SSD is at least better than spinning disks right? Well now you can use local host SSDs as a read cache for an entire VM or maybe just a single disk.
vSphere vCenter virtual Appliance can now support up to 5000 virtual machines. I’m having fewer and fewer reasons to build out an entire VM now. This makes me want to just deploy the vApp and be done with the whole process.
Application HA. vSphere has been able to provide virtual machine high availability for a while now, but with the release of 5.5 they can also take action against guest services as well.

Additional Announcements

VMware NSX will be taking over for vCNS (vCloud Networking and Security). I was told that vCNS will still be available in 5.5 but future iterations would be inside the NSX Product. NSX uses the VXLAN protocols to virtualize the physical infrastructure. ESXi hosts will now be able to manage internal routing, switching and firewalls.

VMworld 2013 Preparation

Wed, 21 Aug 2013 13:27:16 +0000

In the event that you’re heading to VMworld 2013 in San Francisco, this post should help to prepare you for what to expect.

Packing

This is a five-day event that will consist of a ton of walking, some bouts of sitting, social engagements, labs, and fun.

Packing rule #1 - wear comfortable shoes. Walking back and forth from your hotel, to the conference center for sessions, to the solutions exchange and general moving about will destroy your feet.

An Overview of [VMware] Virtual Networks

Mon, 24 Jun 2013 13:18:45 +0000

This post was a direct result of a request from one of my readers. I hope that this post will explain VMware networks a bit more and how they fit into a production network.

To begin I’d like to review how a VMware ESXi server might have its virtual switches and port groups setup to connect to a physical switch. Here is a list of networks that we’ll be working with.

2013 Top 50 Blogs Awards (vSphere Land)

Tue, 18 Jun 2013 13:31:20 +0000

A few months ago there was an annual vote to determine the top 50 virtualization bloggers according to vsphere-land.com. These top 50 bloggers are then added to the vLaunchPad where they will remain cataloged for a year until the next year’s voting. Kudos to Eric Siebert for running this whole process!

TheITHollow.com was lucky enough to make the top 50 in it’s first year of existence and to celebrate I asked my good friends (well, family really) over at www.whateverinspires.com to create a top 50 badge to put on my site. They were happy to oblige and even created a top 25 and also a top 10.

vExperts 2013

Mon, 03 Jun 2013 12:03:38 +0000

Once per year VMware takes time to present the VMware vExpert distinction to members of the community Evangelizing, teaching, helping and speaking about VMware techniques.

The annual VMware vExpert title is given to individuals who have significantly contributed to the community of VMware users over the past year. The title is awarded to individuals (not employers) for their commitment to sharing their knowledge and passion for VMware technology above and beyond their job requirements.

Resource Pools are NOT for Everyone

Wed, 24 Apr 2013 13:24:57 +0000

VMware Resource Pools are not something that should be thrown into every vSphere implementation! I considered not writing this post, because of all of the blogs I’ve seen that have written about this already. If you don’t believe me, check out a few of these:

http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/1512-dont-add-resource-pools-for-fun,-theyre-dangerous.html http://wahlnetwork.com/2012/02/01/understanding-resource-pools-in-vmware-vsphere/ http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2009/11/13/resource-pools-and-shares/ http://frankdenneman.nl/2010/05/18/resource-pools-memory-reservations/

Unfortunately, I continue to hear resource pools being misunderstood. Don’t get me wrong, these are great tools and have a place in your arsenal, but they are used for a very specific reason.

Baby Dragon Home Lab

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 15:00:41 +0000

My configuration is listed below if anyone is interested in the details.

Similar designs have been done before by both Chris Wahl @Chriswahl and prior to that by Phillip Jaenke @RootWyrm who called them " Baby Dragons". I used their base config and made a few tweaks of my own based on pricing, part availability etc.

Part List

ESXi Servers - Quantity 2

Case: Lian Li PC-V351B MicroATX
PSU: SeaSonic Platinum SS-400FL2 Fanless 400W
RAM: Kingston 16GB (4 X 8GB) 240-Pinn DDR3 Unbufferred ECC
Motherboard: Supermicro MBD-X9SCM-F-O
CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1230 V2 Ivy Bridge 3.3GHz
NICs: Intel EXPI9301CTBLK 1000Mbps PCI-Express, SuperMicro Dual Port Gigabit Card
Boot: Kingston DataTraveler 101 G2 8GB USB 2.0
Local SSD: 64 GB Intel SSD

Flex Server - Quantity 1 (Used for a Hyper-V server, VSA or 3rd ESXi Host)

Case: HP Gen8 Microserver
Storage: 4 480GB SSD’s from OCZ

Storage Array

Synology Array: 1- Synology DS1513+
Hard Drives: 5 1 TB Wester Digital Blue 7200 3.5 inch hard drives

Networking Equipment

Layer 3 Switch: Cisco WS03750G-24T Switch
Firewall: Cisco ASA
Wireless Router: Dlink Wireless N+ Router

ESXi Server Notes:

I’m not going to lie, when I saw these cases on Chris Wahl’s lab and had to have them. They look crazy sharp and I love the pull out Motherboard mounting option. There are other components in common but I have a feeling these were copied because of a similar taste for components and budget rather than lust! :)

Biggest Single Point of Failure

Mon, 01 Apr 2013 14:51:13 +0000

I see a good number of IT shops with my job and in most cases the largest priority is system uptime. I might be there to install, troubleshoot, etc. but in the front off my mind is the idea that everything must stay up and running.

IT departments are adding redundant WAN connections, server clusters, fault tolerance, failover devices, disaster recovery sites and redundancies at every level. But in some cases these departments are forgetting a pretty integral part of continuous uptime.

Are you thin or thick? Where at?

Tue, 26 Mar 2013 13:47:47 +0000

I’m often asked about how to provision virtual machine disks. This almost always comes down to, “Should I use thick or thin disks?” and then “Should I do thin provisioning on the array or on the hypervisor?”

So here we go: Thin vs Thick

Thin provisioning:

Thin provisioned disks don’t allocate all of the space during the provisioning of the storage. Instead, they allocate the space on demand. This is a great way to get more bang for you buck out of your storage. Let’s take a closer look with an example.

Happy 1 Year Birthday to theITHollow.com

Mon, 25 Feb 2013 14:56:34 +0000

It’s hard to believe but theITHollow.com is now 1 year old! The first year has been great and I feel like I’ve probably learned more writing it than the readers have learned from reading it. Thank you for a great first year and if you keep reading it, I’ll keep writing it.

Understanding VMware Slot Sizes

Tue, 05 Feb 2013 14:45:12 +0000

VMware slot sizes are an important topic if you’re concerned with how many ESXi hosts are required to run your environment.

What is a Slot?

To begin this post, we need to understand what a slot is. A slot is the minimum amount of CPU and memory resources required for a single VM in an ESXi cluster. Slot size is an important concept because it affects admission control.

A VMware ESXi cluster needs a way to determine how many resources need to be available in the event of a host failure. This slot calculation gives the cluster a way to reserve the right amount of resources.

VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 1)

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 14:38:57 +0000

I recently decided to give VMware Horizon a shot and found the install to be a little confusing so this gives me a good opportunity to lay it all out so that others can try it out for themselves. A big “thank you” goes out to Raj Jethnani for a helping hand with this post. If you’d like to follow him on twitter his link is here: @rajtech

For those of you who don’t know, Horizon is a nifty SAAS platform for you to present thinapp applications too. I could see many organizations benefit from this technology in the near future.

VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 2)

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 14:37:29 +0000

VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 1) VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 3) VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 4)

Configure the Horizon Service

Now that the appliances are setup, it’s time to get busy configuring them. Go to the web address of the Horizon service that you configured (from part 1)

In our case this was http://theithollow.hollow.lab

The first page isn’t very interesting, just begin the wizard.

The second page is almost less interesting, because you have to put in your license key that cost you money. It has to be done, so enter it here.

VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 3)

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 14:36:58 +0000

VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 1) VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 2) VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 4)

In the last part we configured the Horizon Connector, now we’re going to run the setup wizard in order to assign applications and select users.

Horizon Connector Setup Wizard

Let’s begin the setup wizard

Join the domain. Enter the domain name and enter the username and password that has permissions to add a machine to the domain.

VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 4)

Mon, 28 Jan 2013 14:35:34 +0000

VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 1) VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 2) VMware Horizon Install Guide (part 3)

In the last part, we finished setting up the basics of Horizon Connector and the Service Portal.

Now we can login to the Service Portal to assign our applications.

Application Prerequisites

A couple of more prerequisites should be done before we log in.

First, install the Horizon agent on all (or a few test machines) clients that will be using the thinapp packages that are published with Horizon.

The Effect of Too Many Virtual CPUs

Mon, 21 Jan 2013 15:40:13 +0000

Many times I see new virtualization admins add too many vCPUs to virtual machines after they’ve converted their physical machines. I believe the reason for this is a simple misunderstanding that more is not always better in this case.

With physical servers, the more is better approach seems to work fine. If you have a quad core processor it’s better than a dual core and if you have a dual processor server it’s better than a single socket. When it comes to virtual machines extra processors can actually make a VM perform worse than having too few processors.

HP Performance Viewer

Mon, 14 Jan 2013 14:42:54 +0000

I decided to check out the new HP Performance Viewer and found it to be pretty useful. The appliance comes as an OVF so it’s great for importing into your vSphere environment. Once it’s installed you can go to the management URL and all you have to do is provide the name of the vCenter and login credentials. That’s all for the configuration!

At this point I’d give the appliance some time to gather statistics, but if you just can’t wait I’ll give you some of the details from my install.

My VMware Certified Advanced Professional 5 - Datacenter Design Experience

Thu, 10 Jan 2013 14:47:12 +0000

I recently took the VCAP5 - DCD exam and wanted to share my experience for anyone who is preparing for this exam as well.

Study

In my opinion this is a fairly difficult exam to do any sort of preparation for. Most of my preparation was just every day design that I’ve acquired over the years. I think the biggest trick for a lot of administrators is to switch from a mode of thinking about things in a breakfix method, but rather as a holistic design methodology. I prefer to look at a design as a “pie in the sky” approach where I put all the best solutions I can come up with to meet a design requirement, and then start to modify those based on any constraints that might be known.

VMware Ballooning explained

Wed, 26 Dec 2012 14:20:29 +0000

In my last post I explained a memory reclamation technique called Transparent Page Sharing. This post is dedicated to the Balloon driver method.

The first thing to be clear about is that Memory Ballooning is a technique that is only engaged when the host is running low on physical memory. If you have a host with 60 GB of physical memory available and the virtual machines are only allocated a total of 30GB of memory, then you may never need to know what memory ballooning is all about. However if you are over committing your hosts then this is an important topic to review.

Memory De-duplication in VMware

Mon, 17 Dec 2012 15:15:01 +0000

One of the companies I worked for got a Netapp filer and I loved the fact that it would dedupe the data that was sitting on disk. I got over 40% more storage just by having that sweet little feature on. I was thinking, “How awesome would it be to dedupe my memory?” Getting more memory out of my servers would be a nice thing. Well as it turns out, VMware does this already, but they call it “Transparent Page Sharing.”

Software iSCSI load balancing in ESXi 5

Mon, 03 Dec 2012 14:14:56 +0000

When you team NICs together in ESXi 5 you can pick from a variety of load balancing techniques to determine how traffic should flow over the adapters. You might think that setting up software iSCSI initiators in ESXi would be done in a similar manner. Add a VMkernel to a vSwitch, add a couple of adapters and set a teamingfailover policy. It turns out that this is not the case. You could setup a software iSCSI initiator this way, but it won’t provide you the teaming or failover you’ve intended.

My VCAP5-DCA Experience

Wed, 21 Nov 2012 17:06:24 +0000

I just found out that I’ve passed the VMware Certified Advanced Professional 5 - Datacenter Administration exam and wanted to share my experience.

When I first set out to take on this exam, I was apprehensive about it because of the number of possible questions that could be asked on it. The blueprint was quite large and covered basically everything related to vSphere. I got some helpful advice from a friend who told me that instead of worrying about if I could pass the exam, think about it like vSphere Olympics. It’s a chance to show off how much you know. It was a subtle change, but a different mindset really helped me.

vSphere 5.1 SSO issues

Tue, 13 Nov 2012 14:00:09 +0000

Over the past few weeks, I’ve been hearing a lot of customers having issues logging into vCenter after upgrading to vSphere 5.1. I upgraded the lab and had some issues as well, but was able to fix the issues and wanted to share what I’ve learned. As you may know version 5.1 of vSphere requires the SSO service to be installed before vCenter can be upgraded. SSO is required for this version and cannot be skipped.

HP Insight Control for vCenter

Mon, 05 Nov 2012 15:15:10 +0000

I recently tried out the HP Insight Control plugin for vCenter and was very pleased about the added functionality that was provided in my vSphere client.

http://h18013.www1.hp.com/products/servers/management/integration.html

This plugin gives you additional control of your HP servers and storage that are being used by your vSphere environment. Like other storage vendors, the install will configure your VASA plugin, and will also allow you to do things such as create datastores and snapshots on the storage array from the vSphere Client.

VMware Path Masking

Tue, 30 Oct 2012 13:15:34 +0000

I’ve written posts in the past regarding LUN masking on a storage array, but it is possible to mask a path directly from your vSphere environment. I feel that if at all possible the masking should be handled at array level because the array is closest to the disk. Let’s face it, if vSphere shouldn’t see a LUN for one reason or another, then why is the array presenting it in the first place?

Updating HP ESXi Hosts with VUM

Mon, 22 Oct 2012 14:16:26 +0000

As you may well know, when installing VMware ESXi on an HP server, it is best practice to get a specific image of the hypervisor with the vendor’s drivers included. This will prevent issues such as having missing network cards once you’ve installed ESXi. But what about keeping the server up to date?

Many companies update their servers on a monthly basis for compliance reasons or just best practices. It has been my experience that VMware patches are usually deployed at the same time. VMware Update Manager (VUM) can push updates to the ESXi hosts with the latest patches from VMware, but did you know that you can also use it to patch HP Drivers and CIM providers?

Microsoft Licensing with VMware View Composer

Mon, 08 Oct 2012 14:00:29 +0000

I know the subject of Microsoft licensing makes most administrators want to crawl under a desk and hide when the topic comes up, but it’s important to understand a few things if you’re going to be standing up a VMware View deployment, or any VDI project.

During the install of a Windows 7 operating system you of course have to enter a license key. Once the OS has been installed and booted up, it needs to activate. Product activation is necessary so that Microsoft can make sure that the software is only installed on the number of PCs that were licensed to use it. This product activation can be done via a network connection or via telephone. When you enter your assigned volume license keys during installation you have two types of keys that you can enter:

Chicago VMUG Conference 2012 Presentations

Wed, 03 Oct 2012 00:44:03 +0000

Recently my friend Raj (@rajtech) and I presented two sessions at the Chicago VMware Users Conference in Schaumburg, IL.

I’ve promised several people that attended the event, that I’d post the slides. They are below.

SRM Presentation Chicago VMUG Conference 2012 DS Presentation Chicago VMUG Conference 2012

VMUG Benefits

Sun, 23 Sep 2012 01:35:03 +0000

I signed up for the VMware Users Group last year at VMworld. I don’t remember, why I decided to do it but I assume that it had something to do with a free T-shirt. Since then, I’ve been to several meetings, all at my local Chicago VMUG chapter www.chicagovmug.com . At first I was pretty skeptical, but it turns out it’s been one of the best things I’ve done for my career.

VMworld 2012 Right Here Right Now

Sun, 02 Sep 2012 02:24:48 +0000

VMworld 2012 was in San Francisco this year and the weather was beautiful. San Francisco was a lovely host and the Moscone Center proved to be very capable of handling the large crowds that were around for the event.

The Solutions Exchange was massive. It included companies like HP, EMC, Netapp as well as some startup companies like Tintri, PHD Virtual and a very new Cloud Physics which was the talk of VMworld this year. Check them out at http://www.cloudphysics.com.

Veeam Replication for vSphere

Mon, 06 Aug 2012 13:30:15 +0000

I recently took a closer look at Veeam to do some replication work. I’ve used Veeam to do VMware backups, but never really considered it to do any replication work. Most of the time VMware Site Recovery Manager is my tool of choice to do replication if my storage array can’t do it. But Veeam makes a great alternative for doing replication.

The current version of Veeam can re-ip, run on a schedule, do bandwidth throttling, as well as remapping networks.

VMware DPM Green Datacenters

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 13:58:39 +0000

Now that we’ve entered the virtualization age, we’ve become accustomed to moving workloads between hosts in order to get better performance. We’re so used to it, that VMware DRS will move workloads around automatically and many administrators don’t even care what host is running their virtual machines. Hosts are now more like a resource container, where we move our servers to the resource that is most available.

VMware lets us take DRS one step further, where if we have extra resources available that aren’t being used, we can power off the hosts in order to save on power consumption. If we have 50 hosts running, but only using the resources of 30 of them, let’s power off the remaining 20 hosts to save on power and cooling. Over a year, these types of savings can really add up.

Using ESXTOP and RESXTOP to Obtain Performance Metrics

Wed, 25 Jul 2012 01:13:39 +0000

Sometimes we need a quick set of statistics to see what is going on inside a vSphere host. Sort of like using Microsoft’s task manager on a Windows server, we can quickly take a look at what some performance stats on the VMware hosts. A couple of the tools to do this are the esxtop and resxtop commands.

Esxtop and resxtop are basically the same with the exception that esxtop must be run directly on the vSphere host by connecting via SSH. Resxtop can be run remotely from the vMA perhaps. Below is a screenshot of the two tools running side by side. Aside from the refresh rates not being matched up, you can see that they are both showing the same information.

VMDirectPath I/O Basic Setup

Tue, 10 Jul 2012 00:46:36 +0000

While I was studying for the VCAP-DCA I realized that many people might not have access to a lab that includes the capability to do VMDirectPath I/O. My own lab is using nested ESXi hosts inside of VMware Workstation so I don’t have access to DirectPath either, but I was able to borrow some equipment in order to test my skills.

If you don’t have access to this type of equipment but want to study for the VCAP5-DCA, the below setup should suffice for you to learn it, as the setup is not very difficult.

Lowering Disaster Recovery Costs with Site Recovery Manager

Fri, 22 Jun 2012 14:04:40 +0000

Setting up a disaster recovery site can be a costly endeavor. VMware Site Recovery Manager has made disaster recovery much simpler, but it’s still expensive to get a DR site up and going. Rack space, power, cooling, bandwidth, storage and compute can all add up pretty quickly, not to mention that hopefully you’ll never have to use this equipment.

Replication Bandwidth

Bandwidth could be very expensive depending on how much data needs to be replicated. Consider some of these techniques to make the best use of your bandwidth.

VMware SRM Gotchas

Tue, 19 Jun 2012 02:14:01 +0000

I recently presented my current employers DR Strategy at the Chicago Vmug and had several comments about the gotchas section so I thought I’d get them on the blog for future reference.

During our DR Test we found several items that need to be carefully considered when doing a failover to a secondary site. It is my hope that this post provides a good starting point for considering your own DR Strategy using VMware Site Recovery Manager.

vSphere 5 AutoDeploy Basics

Tue, 05 Jun 2012 13:55:52 +0000

vSphere AutoDeploy always seemed like a lot of work to setup just to deploy a few VMware hosts, but in my current job I don’t setup hosts very often. If you are constantly deploying new hosts to get out in front of performance issues, or are building a new datacenter and deploying many hosts at once, AutoDeploy can be a great way to get up and running quickly.

Prerequisites

In order to use AutoDeploy, you’ll first need vSphere5, the AutoDeploy Install (which is on the vCenter Media), the vSphere5 Offline Bundle, PowerCLI, a DHCP Server and a TFTP server for starters.

Using PowerCLI for VMware Update Manager

Thu, 31 May 2012 13:29:08 +0000

You never know when you’ll need to script something and PowerCLI gives you the tools to do it. I decided to see if I could script some of the VMware Update Manager (VUM) tasks while I was reviewing section 5.2 of the VCAP5-DCA Beta Blueprint and found that the procedures were quite easy. My next thought was, “Why would I want to script this when I can use the GUI, and on top of that I can schedule scans and remediation already?” My answer was, “You never know.” Who knows when you’ll need to use the PowerCLI to accomplish a task. Maybe, you’re scripting something so someone else can run it without really knowing how to perform the task, or you’re trying to get a report, or who knows.

Upgrading ESXi hosts using VMware Update Manager

Tue, 29 May 2012 19:42:54 +0000

Unlike many operating systems, VMware ESXi gives you a nice tool to upgrade their hypervisor to the latest version. VMware Update Manager gives you the ability to grab the latest build and apply it to your existing ESXi hosts.

I should mention that VMware Update Manager is not the only solution to upgrade your ESXi hosts. Hosts can also be upgraded manually by booting the host to the latest build and performing an upgrade, or by utilizing the new autodeploy features in vSphere 5. VMware Update Manager is a simple tool that can automate the installs on several hosts in sequence and is available with all editions of vSphere 5.

Simple Free VMware Backups

Sun, 20 May 2012 21:44:01 +0000

If you need to backup some of your virtual machines, maybe it’s time to consider VMware Data Recovery 2.0. This VMware appliance provides an easy way to backup some virtual machines for free, but if you’re looking for a large scale backup solution it might be necessary to use more traditional backup solutions from Symantec or Veeam.

To get started, download the VMware Data Recovery iso from vmware.com. The iso includes a plugin for vCenter as well as an OVF for deploying the appliance. Once you’ve deployed the OVF template and installed the vCenter plugin, you can open the vDR from the solutions and applications section of the vCenter console.

NLB in vSphere (Unicast or Multicast)?

Tue, 08 May 2012 18:37:56 +0000

Suppose you have multiple virtual machines that you would like to distribute load across that are housed inside of your virtual environment. How do we go about setting up Network Load Balancing so that it will still work with things like DRS and VMotion?

Switch Refresher

In most networks we have switches that listen for MAC addresses and store them in their MAC Address Table for future use. If a switch receives a request and it knows which port the destination MAC address is associated with, it will forward that request out the single port. If a switch doesn’t know which port a MAC Address is associated with, it will basically send that frame out all of it’s ports (known as flooding) so that the destination can hopefully still receive it. This is why we’ve moved away from hubs and moved towards switches. Hubs will flood everything because they don’t keep track of the MAC Addresses. You can see how this extra traffic on the network is unwanted.

Poor Man's SRM Lab (Whitebox)

Thu, 03 May 2012 12:32:17 +0000

I really wanted to test out some VMware Site Recovery Manager scenarios and realized that buying SANs, servers and networking equipment was quite expensive. I also didn’t have a lot of space in my house that was available for running all of this equipment. After completing my VCP5 I was given a copy of VMware Workstation 8 and thought that I might be able to build a nested virtual environment, where the ESXi hosts themselves were virtualized inside of workstation. (Don’t worry, virtualizing a virtual host doesn’t warp time or space, it’s safe.)

Netapp VASA Provider 1.0

Tue, 01 May 2012 18:58:25 +0000

Netapp has released their vStorage APIs for Storage Awareness (VASA) provider 1.0 to their support site. http://support.netapp.com If you’re not that familiar with the VASA concept, this article should explain what it is and how it’s used in regards to VMware vSphere 5.

What is VASA?

VASA Providers collect information about your storage systems and present that information to vSphere. In previous versions of vSphere, an administrator might need to keep track of hisher datastores in a spreadsheet or have a naming convention that showed the properties of an individual datastore. For example, if your storage system had both SSD and Sata disks, the Datastore might be named VMFS01_SSD or something similar.

VMware Replication Setup for Site Recovery Manager

Tue, 24 Apr 2012 12:21:22 +0000

Recently, I wrote a blog post about how to setup and configure VMware Site Recovery Manager for vSphere 5.0. This setup included using array based storage replication to transfer data and it ignored the new VMware replication engine that is included with Site Recovery Manager 5.0. This post is intended to cover the setup and configuration of the vSphere replication.

If you’re not familiar with it, the vSphere Replication Management Server handles individual replication of powered on virtual machines, to a secondary site. This is a free vSphere appliance with the purchase of VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.0. Traditionally, vSphere required that the storage providers were replicating the virtual machine data for SRM to work, but that has all changed with 5.0. Now VMware can do the replication for you.

VMware Site Recovery Manager Basic Setup

Fri, 20 Apr 2012 17:23:49 +0000

Finally, the idea of running a Disaster Recovery test is manageable. VMware Site Recovery Manager combined with vSphere has made it possible to test a failover to a warm site without worrying that the DR test itself will cause an outage.

Setting up Site Recovery Manager and performing a site failover sounds like a daunting task, but VMware has made this very simple, assuming you are familiar with vSphere already. If you already have a virtual environment setup at both your production site and a secondary site, SRM is pretty simple to get started with but allows for almost any DR Plan you can think of to be run.

Virtual Routing for Bubble Networks

Wed, 18 Apr 2012 14:13:57 +0000

A question often comes up about what to do when you have a segmented virtual network that needs to be able to traverse subnets. This might happen if you’re doing some testing and don’t want the machines to contact the production network, or perhaps doing a test SRM failover and having the virtual machines in their own test network. Virtual machines in subnet (A) might need to contact other virtual machines in subnet (B) but don’t have access to the physical router any longer, so they can’t communicate. To solve this issue, how about we try a virtual router?

SQL HA Mirroring with vCenter

Sun, 15 Apr 2012 21:27:51 +0000

We’re probably all aware of the benefits of clustering things like SQL Server in order to provide highly available data. But shared storage clustering has some drawbacks on VMware ESXi clusters such as not being able to vMotion.

• Database Mirroring – SQL Server database mirrors utilize a non-shared storage availability solution, using built-in SQL Server replication technology to create and maintain one or more copies of each database on other SQL Servers in the environment. SQL Server database mirrors provide application-aware availability, and the lack of a quorum disk makes this a VMware-friendly solution, allowing the full use of vMotion, DRS, and HA.

Netapp VSC4 Optimization and Migration

Tue, 10 Apr 2012 23:40:13 +0000

One of my most frequently read articles is on how to use MBRAlign to align your virtual machine disks on Netapp storage. Well, after Netapp has released their new Virtual Storage Console (VSC4) the tedious task of using MBRAlign might be eased for some admins.

Optimization and Migration The new VSC4 console for vSphere has a new tab called Optimization and Migration. Here you are able to scan all or some of your datastores to check the alignment of your virtual machines. The scan manager can even be set on a schedule so that changes to the datastore will be recognized.

Understanding Beacon Probing

Tue, 27 Mar 2012 12:30:32 +0000

If you’ve built a virtual infrastructure you’ve probably had to decide whether or not to use Beacon Probing when setting up your vSwitch uplink ports. But what is it, and why do we need it?

Let me propose a scenario. Assume that we have a virtual switch with three uplinks, and one of those uplinks fails.

If the uplinks are setup correctly, they will see the failed uplink and start sending their frames over the other active uplinks. This is standard network fault tolerance from vSphere.

VMware Network Traffic Routing

Fri, 16 Mar 2012 13:00:27 +0000

VMware has lots of ways to setup networking on their ESXi hosts. In order to set this up in the best way for your needs, it’s important to understand how the traffic will be routed between VMs, virtual switches, physical switches and physical network adapters.

Before looking at an example, we should review some networking 101. Machines on the same vlan on the same switch can communicate with one another (assuming there is no firewall type devices in the way). Machines on different vlans on the same switch cannot communicate unless the traffic passes through a router.

Path Selection Policy with ALUA

Thu, 08 Mar 2012 13:58:05 +0000

It’s important to understand how VMware ESXi servers handle connections to their associated storage arrays.

If we look specifically with fibre channel fabrics, we have several multipathing options to be considered. There are three path selection policy (PSP) plugins that VMware uses natively to determine the I/O channel that data will travel over to the storage device.

Fixed Path
Most Recently Used (MRU)
Round Robin (RR)

Let’s look at some examples of the three PSPs we’ve mentioned and how they behave. The definitions come from the vSphere 5 storage guide found below.

Virtualization vs Emulation

Wed, 07 Mar 2012 15:00:21 +0000

Emulation and Virtualization are not the same thing. In many cases you’ll hear them used interchangeably but they are different concepts.

Emulation

Emulation consists of taking the properties of one system and trying to reproduce it with a different type of system. When it comes to computers, you may have seen some software emulators that you can install and run on a PC or MAC, that will reproduce the characteristics of an older system such as a Nintendo or other gaming console. As an example you could then perhaps run Super Mario Bros. on your work desktop (I am not advocating the playing of video games at work). In this case the software emulator is mimicking the gaming console so that the game could be run inside the emulator, even though the underlying hardware is an x86 architecture.

Overview of vStorage API Array Integration (VAAI)

Mon, 05 Mar 2012 19:06:36 +0000

Many storage providers have been working with VMware to improve performance of disks by giving VMware access to invoke capabilities of the storage system. There are basically three main primitives that VMware can invoke to do this.

Full Copy
Hardware Assisted Locking
Block Zeroing

Full Copy

Lets look at what happens when you clone a VM without VAAI. The ESXi server will start to copy the blocks of the original VM and start to paste them in the new location. Below is an animation to describe this process.

Extending Windows System Drives with vSphere

Fri, 02 Mar 2012 16:29:13 +0000

vSphere has made it very simple to resize disks. They old days of finding larger disks to put in your severs and cloning or migrating data aren’t necessary now that virtualization has become widely used.

If you’re using vSphere you can easily extend non system drives by changing the size of the Hard Disk, and then going into the virtual machine and using diskpart or Disk Manager and extending the drive.

SAN Snapshots vs VMware Snapshots

Tue, 28 Feb 2012 02:33:24 +0000

I found people have a hard time understanding that a SAN Snapshot and a VMware snapshot are fundamentally different. I think because unless you’re a storage administrator, you’re probably not dealing a whole lot with snaps to begin with. VMware has made it more commonplace for System Administrators to deal with snapshot technology.

SAN Snapshots

Lets first look at how traditional SANs take snapshots.

To start we have 6 blocks being used. The file system has marked blocks which blocks are being used.

VMWorld 2011

Sat, 25 Feb 2012 19:42:15 +0000

VMworld 2011 was held at the Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas. Over 25,000 attendees this year.

It was held in Las Vegas, but the sites and attractions didn’t take away from the event. Despite all the distractions that Las Vegas can provide, there was too much going on at VMworld to get caught up in the city.

My favorite part of VMworld was the Hands on Labs.

After signing up for the specific lab you wanted, you were ushered to your assigned desk. There were dual screen workstations setup at every desk and very straight forward instructions on how to complete the labs. These labs would get very in depth and would show you why and what was happening behind the scenes when you would perform your operations. I especially enjoyed the Netapp lab.