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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. ...

Last week I attended the Virtualization Field Day 3 put on by the amazing staff at GestaltIT. One of the sessions was hosted by the folks at Atlantis Computing and they were giving us an overview of their Atlantis USX product. All travel expenses and incidentals were paid for by Gestalt IT to attend Virtual Field Day 3. This was the only compensation given. Atlantis USX Overview Before we get to the crux of the issue, a quick refresher on what Atlantis USX does. The USX product will utilize existing SAN, NAS and DAS and combine it with a server ram to do caching. The value proposition is that Atlantis USX can carve out RAM to be used as either a whole datastore (SUPER FAST) or combine it with existing storage and have it act as a cache. Keeping the cache so close to the processor without having to go across a bus or HBA, which can add additional latency, can be an important addition to a performance strapped storage solution. ...

One of the companies I was most interested in seeing at the GestaltIT Virtualization Field Day 3, was CloudPhysics. I was already a little familiar with the company because I’d written a post on my experience in the lab. While my original post was obviously good, you can’t really get a more passionate and knowledgeable explanation of the solution than from the Co-founder and CTO Irfan Ahmad. The presentations can be found online. ...

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. :) ...

VMTurbo was kind enough to come to the GestaltIT Virtualization Field Day 3, and present to a group of technical bloggers about their product “Operations Manager”. I was familiar (or thought that I was) with this product so I expected to see a presentation about some software that would give you alarms when virtual workloads started to misbehave. I found out that my perception about this product was misguided so I wanted to clear it up for anyone else who was under the same impression as I was. ...

I was fortunate enough to have spent some time at the Coho Data headquarters this week for the announcement that their new product, DataStream 1000, is now generally available. The announcement was made at the GestaltIT Virtualization Field Day 3, which was streamed live and the recordings can be found online. All travel expenses and incidentals were paid for by Gestalt IT to attend Virtual Field Day 3. This was the only compensation given. ...

If you are coming up on a storage refresh cycle soon, Pure Storage is worth taking a look at as your new storage array. I was fortunate enough to see them present their solution at Virtualization Field Day 3 this year and got a good look at their storage. All travel expenses and incidentals were paid for by Gestalt IT to attend Virtual Field Day 3. This was the only compensation given. ...

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. ...