Exploring Cloud Technology

The top 10 VMware tools an admin can't live without Here's my top 10 list of tools that a VMware admin can't live without: 1. VMware vSphere Client - I have to give the first position on this list to the vSphere client. Without it you won't be able to do much with vSphere and it is the program that we, as VMware admins, will likely spent 90% or more of our time with. 2. PuTTY -- PuTTY is a free secure shell, or SSH, client that you can use to connect to your ESX hosts and manage them from the command line. It is super small and you don't even have to install it. What could be better? Alternatively, you can use the commercial SecureCRT. In addition to other advanced features, SecureCRT can save usernames and passwords to allow you to automatically log in. 3. Veeam FastSCP -- Every admin must have a SCP client so that he can move ISO images and virtual machines to and from his ESX servers. Better yet, FastSCP is totally free. It can also be used to schedule simple ...

Quick Migration in Hyper-V is Microsoft’s way to provide high availability in their virtual infrastructure. Quick Migration requires setup of a Microsoft Cluster to be able to failover VMs from one Hyper-V host to another. This requires Enterprise or Datacenter licenses for Windows. But what does this mean? Microsoft does not support two Hyper-V hosts accessing the same LUN at the same time. You have to setup Cluster Disks that only one host can access. This means that when you want to do a failover with Quick Migration – you failover the whole LUN. All guests (VMs) that use that specific LUN will be suspended in a short period and then moved to another host. It happens within seconds – but the VM is not accessible in that period and users may lose connectivity. To be able to move a single guest from one Hyper-V host to another host requires that this guest use its own dedicated LUN. This could potentially limit the number of VMs running on a Hyper-V host. For database servers, like SQ...

VMware acquires RTO Software! : "There were rumors before but now it is official! VMware has acquired RTO Software. RTO Software makes brilliant tools in the SBC / VDI space. Let's hope it stays that way! "

Design Challenges Of Virtualized vCenter With A vNetwork Distributed Switch : " The vSphere Enterprise Plus vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS) has been heralded as, and I might add lives up to it’s reputation of, an administrator’s time saver and single point of virtual networking configuration and visibility across many ESX/ESXi 4 hosts. However, the vDS presents some administrative challenges unique from the traditional vNetwork Standard Switch (vSS) that admins are used to. Specifically, since the vCenter 4 Server actually maintains the vDS configuration, some extra design thinking needs to be built into a vSphere 4 environment where a vDS will be used. If vCenter 4 Server itself will be a virtual machine in the environment with a vDS, the design gets even more involved. There are a few possible problems to consider. In this post I’ll first cover (with the help of a several others) general VM and vCenter vDS networking issues, but along the way I’ll explore thoughts about desi...

Verify Recovery Of Full VM Backups With Future Version Of Veeam : " Previously, all we knew about Veeam’s Surebackup was there was a public countdown in process. That countdown reached 0:00 early March 22, 2010 (this morning). Veeam sent emails to those who preregistered and then provided a press release shortly after. The countdown was for the introduction of a unique feature for verifying VM restores that will soon be introduced in the next version of Veeam Backup and Replication. Here’s the information from my email for those that did not sign up to be notified: Breakthrough Technology: Test and Verify the Recoverability of EVERY Backup Veeam is enhancing the SureBackup™ capabilities in Veeam Backup & Replication™ with a breakthrough technology that overcomes the final obstacle of image-level backups. IT professionals will have the ability to verify the RECOVERABILITY of EVERY backup of EVERY virtual machine EVERY time. It’s never been possible before. SureBackup introd...

VMware Knowledge Base Blog: Top 20 Articles for February 2010 : " Here is our Top 20 KB list for February. This list is ranked by the number of times a Tech Support ticket was resolved by following the steps in a published Knowledgebase article. Upgrading to ESX 4.0 and vCenter 4.0 best practices (1009039) FAQ: Supported/Unsupported Devices and Configurations (1184) Downloading and Installing VMware Fusion (1005466) Enhanced VMotion Compatibility (EVC) processor support (1003212) Recreating a missing virtual disk (VMDK) header/descriptor file (1002511) Restarting the Management agents on an ESX or ESXi Server (1003490) VMware Data Recovery 1.0 and Essentials Plus licensing (1012295) Powering off an unresponsive virtual machine on an ESX host (1004340) Uninstalling, reinstalling, and upgrading VMware Fusion (1014529) Unpresenting a LUN containing a datastore from ESX 4.x and ESXi 4.x (1015084) Configuring networking from the ESX service console command line (1000258) Con...

VCP in Top Three Money Making certs : " Here’s a list of the top five technical certifications by average salary: $99,928 – CISSP (Cert. Info. Sys. Security Professional) $93,953 – CCDA (Cisco Certified Design Associate) $91,271 – VMware Certified Professional $89,864 – CCNP (Cisco Certified Network Professional) $86,454 – MCSE (MS Certified Systems Engineer) For a complete breakdown of the top 20 IT certifications by salary and a host of other IT skills and salary information, continue reading: Top five technical certifications by salary at ZDNet . If that isn’t some incentive to get some training as an investment in yourself I don’t know what is. This post brought to you by VMwarewolf VCP in Top Three Money Making certs Related posts: VCP Equals a lot of CASH VMware Jobs VirtualCenter Best Practices Best Practices for Performance – VMware Infrastructure 3 VMware Record and Play "

Virtualization/Sysadmin Links -- 3/8/2010 : " A few links related to virualization and/or systems administration that I recently found interesting enough to bookmark (from my del.icio.us feed ) 10+ Deploys Per Day: Dev and Ops Cooperation at Flickr Enterprise Cloud Risk And Security 20 Linux System Monitoring Tools Every SysAdmin Should Know Ten Things You Didn't Know Apache (2.2) Could Do 10 tips for sensible systems administration Picviz Security Visualization - Disclose Your Enemies System recipes and configuration management -- mds (you can also follow me on Twitter ) "

Video: Cisco Nexus 1000-V and vSphere Video Training : " Unlike just about every other Cisco physical switch, the Cisco's Nexus 1000-V is a virtual software switch. This switch is custom made for VMware vSphere and it is the only 3rd party switch for vSphere. While there is a free 60 day eval of vSphere and the Nexus 1000-V, to use them for the long run, you'll have to buy the highest edition of vSphere - Enterprise Plus - and the Nexus 1000-V, both of which are based on the number of CPUs your servers have which will run the 1000-V. With the Nexus 1000V (N1KV), you get the Cisco IOS command line (actually NX-OS) for your virtual infrastructure, policies, QoS, Security, and many other Cisco switch featuers that you (or your network admin) are used to using. VMware's dvSwitch and the Cisco Nexus 1000V make a powerful team but you mut also know how to install it, add ESX hosts to the new switch, and create port profiles. Once you already have your vSphere infrastructur...

VMware Knowledge Base Weekly Digest: New articles published for week ending 3/13/2010 : " VMware Consolidated Backup Running vcbRestore command to restore VCB backup fails with error (1018768) Date Published: 3/12/2010 VMware ESX VMotion of a 64bit virtual machine from ESX 3.5 to ESX 4.0 host times out at 10% (1017443) Date Published: 3/9/2010 Sending hostd logs to a remote syslog server (1019102) Date Published: 3/8/2010 VMware ESX Server 3.0.3, Patch ESX303-201002201-UG: Updates VMkernel, VMX, hostd (1018026) Date Published: 3/9/2010 VMware ESX Server 3.0.3, Patch ESX303-201002202-UG: Updates net-snmp (1018027) Date Published: 3/9/2010 VMware ESX Server 3.0.3, Patch ESX303-201002203-UG: Updates VMware Tools (1018030) Date Published: 3/9/2010 VMware ESX Server 3.0.3, Patch ESX303-201002204-UG: Updates Libxml2 (1018031) Date Published: 3/9/2010 VMware ESX Server 3.0.3, Patch ESX303-201002205-UG: Security update to BIND (1018032) Date Published: 3/9/2010 VMware ESX Server 3.0.3, Pa...

VMware Knowledge Base Blog: New Knowledgebase Features : " As we hinted on Friday, the VMware Knowledge Base has had a few features added over the weekend that we're pretty excited about! Enhancements include: View by Article ID Subscribing to an article's RSS feed Share and Tweet options Requesting a product feature View by Article ID For those of you familiar enough with our KB articles that you have memorized article numbers, you no longer have to search for an article and open it from search results. You can now open articles directly using the View by Article ID feature. To open an article directly, enter the article ID and click View (it's just to the right of the search box. Subscribing to an article's RSS feed The knowledge base now has an RSS feed option in the Actions box. This is different than our feed of new articles. This feed allows you to subscribe to specific articles so you are alerted every time the article is updated. This might happen for ex...

VMware Labs is online and it Rocks : " VMware Labs is the place where VMware engineers share their cool tools. There is a wide range of tools here for you, including one for automating tasks, getting ESX performance graphs, a rich Internet application framework and much more. You really should check-out the fling section, this is too good to be true. Fling is defined as "a brief casual relationship" as referenced on this site. The "flings" are skunkworks and ideas by VMware engineers that are not yet part of product offering. Feel free to try them and give your feedback. Apache Pivot Apache Pivot is a platform for building rich internet applications in Java. It combines the enhanced productivity and usability features of a modern RIA toolkit with the robustness of the industry-standard Java platform. Dynamo RIO DynamoRIO is a runtime code manipulation system that supports code transformations on any part of a program, while it executes. DynamoRIO gives comple...

VMware VCP Plus : " VMware will shortly announce advanced Certification to follow on from VCP. There will be new Enterprise and Design level Certifications. I cannot disclose the names of the new Certification tracks but look out for external, communication from VMware this month. I can tell you I would be very proud to hold one of these titles. "

VMware Workstation with Teams functionality is a really flexible and usefull : " Little trick for VMware Workstation 7 Teams. I’m still discovering VMware Workstation 7 . After so many years using this software, there are still functionalities I’m discovering. With this VMware product the productivity of preparing labs or testing patching, service pack or updates of software has never been easier. Last time I “discovered” Teams and how it can simplify your life when you need 5-6 Virtual machines together, like Domain controller, Several member servers, 2 Virtual ESX Servers (yes you can install easily now inside of VMware Workstation without tweaking your VMX configuration file ) together with an XP client – all in one Team. Today again I discovered one more. I always powered my Team by Power On button. But you don’t have to. If you want to power on just one individual VM which is part of your Team, you can do it, if you want to. Or you can power few Individual VMs from tha...

Did you know that ESX 3.5 general support will end in less than 90 days? : " Time to upgrade your Virtual Infrastructure? Yes, that’s true. As you can see on this graphic below taken from VMware Website, the general support for VMware VI 3.5 will end the 21st of May 2010 . It’s the same for the 2 hypervisors: ESX 3.5 and ESXi 3.5. For VCB (VMware consolidated backup) version 1.5 you have 5 months to go…. As for vCenter 2.5 it’s the same thing… So for people which they still did not upgraded their infrastructure running under ESX 3.5, it’s high time to do so… 1. These dates do not apply to each individual maintenance (x.y.z) release or update. They apply to minor release level (x.y) only. For details on the maintenance release support lifecycle within a minor release, click on the appropriate minor release version number above. 2. Formerly known as VMware ESX Server . 3. Formerly known as VMware ESX Server 3i Source: VMware You might also be interested in those related posts from ...

Basic VMware ESX CLI networking commands : " Some basic CLI commands for configuring the network, vSwitches and portgroups from command line.. This is not an exhausted list of commands, just few of them. While working through putty session you need to know them. At first the root access to your esx host is disabled by default. You can (thus it’s not really recommended) activate the root access to your ESX Server by modifying one configuration file. If you don’t want to activate the SSH access for a root account, you must connect to your ESX Server via another account (previously created) and do a command switch like that (su stays for switch user): su - Then you’ll be able to enter the root password for your root account. Let’s move and see other commands you can use and they’re usefull. To see the list of NICs attached to your esx host: esxcfg-nics –l For example your output will look like that: I have four NICs configured on my ESX server, which is running for testing as a VM i...