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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. ...

If you’ve got a home lab to play around in, it’s great to have remote access so that you can try things out from the road. This might mean purchasing an expensive firewall or VPN appliance but openvpn has a nice 2 user appliance that can be downloaded as an OVF file, right into your vSphere environment. Installation I mentioned that this is an OVF file, so you know the installation is going to be a snap. Download the bits from OpenVPN.net and deploy into your vSphere cluster. I’m not going to go through the entire OVF deployment, I think you’ll find it very simple even if you haven’t done it before. ...

Microsoft IPAM (IP Address Management) is a feature that was released in Windows Server 2012 to help administrators manage decentralized DHCP and DNS Servers. Previously administrators may have needed to use spreadsheets to keep track of DHCP Scopes, IP Addresses DNS Names etc but with IPAM installed, a single server can refresh all of this data and put it in a single, always up to date place. Deployment Guidelines There are a few things you should know before installing IPAM. ...

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. ...

Mobility is no longer a challenge to traditional IT environments, it’s the standard. Users work from home to save office space, need to be connected during sales trips and are consistently not in the corporate office connected to the local area network (LAN). Combine this demand for a mobile workforce with the ever increasing security requirements put forth such as HIPPA and PCI-DSS etc make this a significant hurdle for IT departments. Microsoft Direct Access may be a solution that eases this hardship. ...

These days, companies are dealing more with mobility, than ever before. IT infrastructure is now spread out in the cloud, and users may be working from the road, remote offices or from home. This is making it more difficult to manage a secure IT Infrastructure. Microsoft is taking steps to allow IT Administrators to start controlling machines even when they aren’t connected to a corporate infrastructure. Microsoft Offline Domain Join was released as a new feature with Windows Server 2008 R2. This feature allows a machine that is not directly connected to a network with Active Directory, to be joined anyway. ...