Trend Micro released Deep Security 8.0 Service Pack 2 on January 21, 2013.

Next to a couple of bugfixes this version supports even more Operating Systems. With this release Trend Micro Deep Security supports Windows 8 and Windows 2012 (agent) and VMware vSphere 5.1 (DSVA).

Click more for a complete list of supported operating systems.

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VKernel, now under the Dell flag, just released version 6.3 of the vOPS Server Explorer freeware suite.Next to the already present tools Environment Explorer, SearchMyVM Explorer, and vScope Explorer  they added two new utilities: Storage Explorer and Change Explorer.

Using the same analytics and advisory engine from the paid vOPS Server Standard product, all five of these utilities provide virtual administrators with a rapid assessment of the state of their environment, for free!

So what is Storage Explorer?

Storage Explorer assesses storage performance and capacity views across datastores and VMs that helps VM admins to get better visibility of their storage environment.

It has the following features:

• Identify critical datastore issues such as overcommitment, low capacity, high latency, VMFS version mismatch.
  Storage Explorer collects inventory and performance data from datastores and apply rules based on best practices to highlight if any critical conditions are found. Such examples includes overcommitment, low capacity and high latency. Other useful information includes VMFS version, storage path policy and number of VMs.
• Identify critical VM issues such as low available disk space, high latency and throughput
  Storage Explorer collects inventory and performance data from VMs and apply rules based on best practices to highlight if any critical conditions are found. Examples includes low available disk space, high latency and throughput.

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There are a lot of choices to be made for networking in VMware vSphere 5. We’ve got the good ol’ vSwith, vSphere Distributed Switch (vDS) and finally the Nexus 1000V from Cisco. But what is the best one?

vSwitch (vSphere standard switch)

A vSphere standard switch is a virtual switch that can be created on a single host. Port groups defined on this vSwitch will be local to the host on which the port group is created. In other words: If you have multiple hosts you have make sure that the port groups are identical across all hosts, especially when you want to use vmotion. For VMotion the port group names on the source and target host have to be the same.

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During the last patch cycle VMware made VMware View 5.1 and vSphere 5.1 compatible with each other.
For VMware vSphere 5.1 to support View 5.1 you need to do download a patch for ESXi 5.1 or an up to date ESXi 5.1 ISO image.

To download the ISO:

• Navigate to the vSphere Download Center.
• Click View Download for the VMware ESXi 5.1.0 Installable for your version of ESXi.
• On the Product Downloads tab, download VMware-VMvisor-Installer-201210001-838463.x86_64.iso.

To download the patch, download ESXi510-201210001 from the Patch Download Center.

Just like with all the other updates: Before you update, make sure all the other components are compatible as well. For example back-up solutions and anti-malware are not always compatible with the most recent versions. Check the documentation before you do the upgrade.

During VMworld 2012 in San Fransisco Trend Micro announced the next version of their hypervisor based security product. They announced a lot of new and cool features and improvements which are probably gonna make into the final product.

I just got a demo at the Trend Micro booth here at VMworld in Barcelona and it look very promising.

(Please remember that the product is not released yet. Things may change before it is generally available.)

vSphere and Cloud support
Deep Security 9 supports vSphere 5.1 and vCloud Networking and Security 5.1. Next to the support for vSphere 5.1 there is also support and integration for vCloud Director and Amazon cloud services.

De-cluttering of the interface

(This article reflects the general session of Tuesday. It isn’t a literal transcript)

Before the first keynote starts the General session was opened with a spectacular show with dancers and music, etc.

First on stage is VMware’s Chief Marketing Officer Rick Jackson.

• It’s 11 degrees centigrade in Copenhagen. ‘We’ve made the right choice’ (It’s about 26 degrees centigrade in Barcelona right now)
• 8,000 attendees;
• VMUG – 75.000 members worldwide, Europe has 45 regional chapters.

Wednesday the general session will be about “Empowering the workforce of tomorrow, that’s here today” by Steve Harrod.

Rick introduces Pat Gelsinger

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The first day of VMworld Europe was, as always, reserved for partners. During this day a lot of partner specific sessions are presented. In the session “How to deliver Services Powered by VMware vCloud (PAR1519)” by Bart Schneider (VSSP manager VMware EMEA).

Some statistics: there are vCloud Powered datacenters in 29 countries and 196 cities. There are more than 150 vClouds with a growth of 169%

In the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Cloud Services four of the five built their cloud proposition on VMware vCloud. The only exception is Amazon. According to Gartner there are only two worthy cloud ecosystems growing in the world right now: Amazon and VMware. We’ll see if VMware is satisfied with a second place.

Use cases for vCloud solutions are:

• Rapid deployment
• Development/test environments
• Tier 1 production applications
• global access
• Elastic Capacity

Last Friday Trend Micro released Deep Security 8.0 Service Pack 1. 

The most significant changes in SP1 are:

• On Demand scan agent based anti-malware on Linux. Supported versions are Red Hat Linux 5, 6 (64 bit only), Suse Linux 10, 11 (32 and 64bit)
• Protecting ESX 4.1/ESXi 4.1 hosts with Deep Security 8.Deep Security can now provide protection for virtual machines running on ESX/ESXi 4.1 and 5.0. You can use the same Deep Security Virtual Appliance in combination with the proper version of the Filter Driver.
• Improved anti-malware scan exclusions.Exclusions were only possible for files. Now directories, files and file extensions are supported for the anti-malware scan, either by listing them specifically or through the use of wildcards.
• More Localization. The manager is now also available in Japanese and Simplified Chinese. The agent and notifier are also localized in German, French, Spanish, Italian, Russian, Japanese, Korean, Simplified Chinese and Traditional Chinese.

When you have installed Deep Security 8.0 it will automatically warn you that an update is available. Since it was only released a couple of days ago there is little  information available about the update. As with all updates, test it on a small scale before deploying it to your full environment.

It is time for an updated version of our build numbers database.
Besides adding the new build numbers I also ‘repaired’ some errors.

If you think you’re missing products or  build numbers, please leave a comment below. I’ll do my best to add them to the list.

One of the things that has been on my to do list for a very long time was to check out the vCenter Appliance. I finally found the time to install the vCenter appliance in my own lab and fool around with it.

This post is a mix between my findings and some kind of installation instruction.

But first of all, what’s the VMware vCenter virtual appliance and what are the pro’s, cons and limitations.

The VMware vCenter virtual appliance is a SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 running VMware vCenter on a internal embedded DB2 database or an external Oracle database. The appliance is available for download on the VMware website and is configured with 2 vCPUs, 8GB RAM, LSI Logic SCSI controller, VMXNET 3 network interface and the VMware Tools.

The advantages over a traditional vCenter implementations are:

• Lower TCO by eliminating Windows licenses;
• Simple and rapid deployment;
• Reduce operational costs – vCSA is easy to upgrade – deploy a new appliance, connect it to the external Oracle database or import configuration data from the previous installation.

10GbE connections are getting more common in the datacenters, even for SMB 10GbE is getting within their reach. In the storage market Dell EqualLogic lagged behind large storage vendors like NetApp in functionality and connectivity but now EqualLogic released their new products on 10GbE, solving the connectivity issue.

Both the PS6000 series for large scale implementations and the PS4000 series for the less demanding customers now have the option for 10GbE with SFP+ (fiber) or 10G Base-T (copper).

The two new models, PS6110 and PS4110, both have copper (10GBase-T) and optical (SFP+) connections. The new models can be mixed with other EqualLogic units in a group. Next to the 10Gbit connections the units have a management port for out of band management.

The PS6110 comes in six configurations with support ranging from high capacity 7,200 RPM SAS hard drives to enterprise-grade SSDs. The PS6110 Series can handle up to 72TB in a single array and 1.2 Petabytes in a single group.

In the PS6110 series is available in the following editions:

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Most companies I visit have spend a lot of money on hardware and software for their primary process.  Operating System software isn’t a problem most of the time, just as the application software.

Management and monitoring software on the other hand is a totally different story. A lot of IT departments have trouble to get their business case positive for management tools. Companies like Veeam and VKernel offer a couple of free tools  for VMware you can install on your desktop.

These tools give you an insight in the health of your environment. When you found out that your environment is less than optimal configured, for example the memory consumption of certain servers, you can fix it with VKernel Optimizer (which costs money, but it  has a 30 day trial). The tools that are freely available from VKernel  are:

• Storage View
• ApplicationView
• CapacityView
• Capacity Modeler

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I recently bought a new server for my home lab, or at least, it was the start of my home lab. After my ESX host crashed two years ago I didn’t took the time to rebuild it.

As I started to rebuild every single VM on my host I quickly became somewhat irritated by the fact that I had to switch to the vSphere client to mount an ISO and then back to my RDP session to do the installation.

I thought to myself “This should be easier. Why isn’t there a tool that can list the ISO’s on the datastores and give you the choice to mount one of them?”.

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Last Friday VMware released the Orchestrator plugin for Active Directory v1.0. With the plugin it is possible to manage Active Directory objects straight from within Orchestrator.

For those of you that don’t know what VMware Orchestrator is:

VMware vCenter Orchestrator provides out of the box workflows that can help administrators automate existing manual tasks. Administrators can utilize sample workflows from VMware vCenter Orchestrator’s workflow library and provide a blueprint for creating additional workflows.

VMware vCenter Orchestrator exposes the building blocks to enable more detailed workflows to be created for VMware vSphere.

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I just fiddled somewhat with the ‘fling’ from the VMware site: PXE Manager. Well, if you ask me, it’s not just a ‘fling’, but it is really, really useful. It’s easy to install and easy to use.

Here’s the summary from the ‘fling’:

PXE Manager for vCenter enables ESXi host state (firmware) management and provisioning. Specifically, it allows:

• Automated provisioning of new ESXi hosts stateless and statefull (no ESX)
• ESXi host state (firmware) backup, restore, and archiving with retention
• ESXi builds repository management (stateless and statefull)

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If you always wanted to present your solution or case to a larg(er) audience, this is your change. The VMworld Content team just sent this e-mail:

Planning is well underway for VMworld 2011. This year, VMworld takes place in Las Vegas, August 29 – September 1 and in Copenhagen, October 18 – 20. VMworld helps you unlock the full simplicity, agility, flexibility and cost efficiency that virtualization and a cloud computing approach to IT make possible.

Share Your Story
As a VMware customer, we’re looking to you to submit sessions describing your own experiences and best practices with one or more of the following topics:

• Business Continuity
• Cloud Application Platforms
• End-User Computing
• Enterprise Applications

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For a couple of ThinApp packaging machines I didn’t want that the packagers had access to the vCenter Client, but still let them revert to a previous snapshot.

So I wrote a couple of lines to accomplish just that from within the packaging machine itself.

The script below reverts the virtual machine back to the snapshot that was created earlier.

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I was reading another article about cloud computing today. Almost all articles and posts seem to focus on how easy it is to add resources to your environment when you need more power.

Before you start to explain to me why this is true, yes, I do agree. It is very easy to add resources to an existing environment. When you use vSphere, Hyper-V or XenServer just add another host to your cluster or datacenter and you have more power that can be used by your machines. You can give virtual machines more CPU power and/or memory, etc. In the end your applications (that’s in the end what’s most important) have more chance for time to run on a shared environment.

My problem with this approach is simple: Aren’t we doing things the wrong way around?

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