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
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 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. ...
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. ...
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. ...
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. ...
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. ...
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. ...
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 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. ...