Virtualization

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. ...

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. :) ...

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”

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. ...

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 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. ...

 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. ...

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. ...

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 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). ...