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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After 12 years it was time for something new, something
exciting, something fresh.

From the 1st of January 2011 I will also be working for
Imtech ICT Infrastructure  Services & Solutions.

I will join Edwin and Erik at Imtech ICT, building the virtualization
solutions they sell.

Of course I will continue blogging at VMGuru.nl, now with real life experiences from Imtech ICT. The main story will still be ‘virtualization’ but the ingredients will differ, NetApp/IBM N-series instead of Dell EqualLogic, IBM servers instead of Dell.

Luc Dekens and Alan Renouf did a great presentation on PowerCLI.

PowerCLI is based on PowerShell. PowerShell is designed by Microsoft with the SysAdmin in mind. It’s the universal language for Windows data centers.

Most of the time GUI interfaces are single purpose and rigid. PowerShell is the glue between your infrastructure. Microsoft makes it as a requirement for new application releases that it will work with PowerShell like SQL Server, Exchange, IIS7, SCOM and more. Commands (called cmdlets) are pretty easy to remember because they are in the verb-noun format (for example get-host)

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Duncan Epping, Consulting Architect, Cloud Practice

Frank Denneman, Consulting Architect, PSO

Duncan and Frank are the authors of the VMware vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS technical deep dive. It is available from Amazon, and from Monday it will also be available at Computer Collectief. You can order it from today from Computer Collectief. The book is definately worth reading. In the session they answered questions from the audience.

Questions

In vSphere 4.1 the algorithms for DRS are changed? Can you give some more information on how VMs are distributed over hosts in case of an HA event?

The changes are more in HA, not in DRS itself. in vSphere 4.0 HA checked all host on where to start the VM. This took a lot of time before a VM actually was started. in vSphere 4.1. It also was a big load on the hostd process on the ESX host. in vSphere 4.1 the process is totally different. The VMs are placed across the ESX hosts in the cluster according to a round-robin principal. On the first host HA will check if the portgroup and datastores exist that the VM needs and then it starts the VM. The next VM is getting started on the next ESX host. VMs are started faster and the load on hostd is almost non-existent.

The most common misconception is that HA and DRS are working together. DRS doesn’t do anything after an HA event. Only when the load on an ESX host is getting above the threshold DRS kicks in

Will there be an integration between HA and DRS? What will happen with the next version considering HA?

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Eric Sloof, instructor and blogger for NTPro.nl, gave a great presentation on advanced troubleshooting on vSphere.

Eric shows that you can use esxtop for troubleshooting on almost every level. He said a lot about troubleshooting. Below you’ll find the things I could write down during his talk.

CPU Ready Time. interval in the graphic is important. The measured time has to be divided by the sample time. He talked about %RDY times and that it isn’t always a problem. Also the different scheduling mechanisms were covered.

Too much vCPUs on a virtual machine. One of the most important things I think was the tantrum: “Only add CPU’s when it necessary. First troubleshoot, then add”

Transparent page sharing reclaims memory by consolidating redundant pages with identical content. When you boot a Windows VM it will zero out all memory blocks. ESX doesn’t know what memory is free within the virtual machine.

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Willem van Engeland (VMware) and Duncan Epping (VMware, Yellow Bricks) did a presentation on vCloud Director.

Paul Maritz said earlier: Cloud-based infrastructure will become the new hardware”, shifting from running your applications on HP, IBM or Dell hardware to Terremark. With vCloud Director you can create your own cloud: public, private or hybrid. VMware published a vCloud API which contains:

• vApp upload & download
• inventory listing
• vApp operations
• catalog management
• task management

vCloud Director is built for scalability. It is tested on 10.000 VMs in a vCloud Director cell, which can contain 25 vCenter servers.

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Today the 6th edition of the Dutch VMUG has started.

Viktor van den Berg, Dutch VMUG leader, opened the VMUG around the 9.30 with a couple of facts and figures around the Dutch VMUG:

• There are more than 50.000 VMUG members in the world
• The Dutch VMUG has 5.131 members
• There are 181 participants for the workshops
• During the keynote 3.000 hands were shaken
• The agenda was opened 6.158 times

Willem van Enter, Regional Directory Benelux, VMware, welcomes all participants and gives a short speech about pride, growth and future about VMware. He hints shortly to the mobile hypervisor, for which they entered a partnership with LG. Their goal is to bring virtualization toe mobile devices so you will be able to use a personal and a business profile/entity/virtual machine on your mobile phone. About one third of the audience heard about this.

Richard Garsthagen, senior Evangelist EMEA, VMware, takes us on the trip to the cloud.

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One of my coworkers pointed me to a video from this years Tech-Ed Europe about VDI protocols. Bernhard Tritsch did an interesting comparison between the different remote protocols used in today’s VDI solutions. In a 60 minute session Bernhard explains the differences between location (host vs client), type (hardware vs software) rendering and compression types (lossless vs lossy).

Although the results aren’t that good for PCoIP (software version) it still is a very interesting video.

We posted a lot of items when we were at VMworld in Copenhagen, so I thought it would be good to give you a summary so you wouldn’t miss a thing.

General

• VMworld 2010 impression video
• VMworld 2010 Roundup
• Ford Donalds, about the VMware labs setup
• VMworld 2010 Party @ the Forum
• vExpert interview for VMworld TV
• vExpert – VMware CTO meeting
• VMworld 2010 opening keynote session
• Building the Solutions Exchange
• VMGuru.nl vRoadTrip
• The journey to the clouds begins
• Video gallery

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At VMworld we had a demo of the products of Scense. They are in the user workspace management. The demo focusses on the problem of one installation corrupting another.

Virtuazing desktops have their own challenges. Profile management is a hot item for VDI. AppSense is one of the products for profile management. AppSense gives you ‘roaming’ profiles between Windows 7, Windows XP and Windows 2008 for example. I shot a video during a product demo at the Solutions Exchange. See the video to learn what AppSense can do for your VDI environment.

For those who never visited VMworld, after two long days with all kinds of sessions, labs and Solutions Exchange booths VMware organizes a party. These parties are always very big. Imagine from the 6000 visitors a lot of them visit the party. There’s a lot of food, drinks, music, games and other things to keep you busy till deep in the night.

Earlier today we shot a video at the Quest booth. They demo’d  vFoglight 6.5 and features of vFoglight storage solution.

Today is the day that we will all remember. Today will mark the start of a new era. In a couple of hours we will be arriving in Copenhagen, Denmark to give you, our readers, the latest info on virtualization, cloud and cloud related items.

Other than the last couple of years we’re traveling by car, not by plane. A couple of people made fun of us, but that doesn’t hurt us. It is only a 7.5 hour drive (according to Google Maps) without any traffic jams. We hope to arrive somewhere in the early evening in our hotel.
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