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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Today is V-day, the day of the annual dutch VMUG and the complete VMGuru.nl will be there to report live from Nieuwegein (NL).

So check out VMGuru.nl regularly today to see and hear what happens at the VMUG event.

You can also follow us on twitter and/or check the #vmugevent and #DutchVMUG tags on twitter.

It’s only two weeks until the annual dutch VMUG with a very impressive speaker line-up. Many international speakers are going to deliver great sessions, workshops and Q/A-sessions at the Nieuwegein Business Center (NBC) on December 10th.

If you’re interest and work involves virtualization and you haven’t registered yet, you should!. This is an event you should NOT miss. Make sure you register and come to Nieuwegein on December 10th 2010. More information can be found here.

Here’s the impressive line-up:

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About two weeks ago I attended a session at the VMware User Group meeting here in the Netherlands about Project VRC.  After the presentation I asked myself: ‘What is the value of this project?‘.

For you who don’t know what Project VRC is:

“Project Virtual Reality Check (VRC) is a joint venture of Log•in Consultants and PQR, who have researched the optimal configuration for the different available hypervisors (hardware virtualization layers). The project arises from the growing demand for a founded advice on how to virtualise Terminal Server and Virtual Desktop (VDI) workloads. Through a number of researches, Log•in Consultants and PQR show you the scaling possibilities for Terminal Server environments as well as Virtual Desktops.” http://www.virtualrealitycheck.net/

Don’t get me wrong: What they did was a very good initiative, it showed the performance differences between different hypervisors. Although the results were not that surprising it was good to see the validation numbers of the things we already knew.

I also think that the guys who did the project where totally surprised by the attention vendors and customers gave to the project. It was an outstanding (marketing) tool to show the value of virtualization and especially XenApp on a hypervisor. Because of this attention the whole project got out of hand. Although this was not the goal of the project, vendors and customers used it as a reference guide for vitalizing XenApp. That’s the point where I started to wonder what the real value of the project VRC was.

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The last breakout session we attended the XTG vCenter Server Heartbeat workshop, a quick way to get familiar with a new VMware product.

The instructor first introduced us to the product and discussed some installation and configuration hints and tips.

After that we quickly started with preparing and cloning the vCenter Server and installing and configuring the vCenter Server Heartbeat product.

The workshop certainly was useful but in a different way you would probably expect.

After the workshop Anne Jan and I discussed our experiences with the product and we quickly agreed that VMware could have spent more time OEM-ing the former Neverfail product to give it a VMware-like interface instead of the 1980′s Windows 3.11 interface it has now. Besides that the configuration of the product has a very high tweaker-level. In our opinion this is a 0.9 version and in the 1.0 versionVMware should definitely address the interface and configuration look and feel.

Nevertheless VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat does what it is supposed to as we saw during the lab exercises where we did a clean failover and finally caused a BSOD which vCenter Server Heartbeat handled perfectly.

I wonder if customers are willing to pay so much money for a product which isn’t worthy the VMware name based on its ancient interface. I know I will be having a very hard time to convince customers to use this to achieve a very high vCenter protection level even when it’s clear that the use case is definitively there.

Joep Piscaer just finished his VMware Lab Manager 4 presentation at the Dutch VMUG and he he shared it at his website, VirtualLifestyle.nl.

Our blogging colleagues at Virtualistic.nl are busy recording it so it should be online soon on their video blog.

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At the fifth Dutch VMUG Event, I’ve given a presentation on VMware vCenter Lab Manager 4. I’ve uploaded the slidedeck of this (Dutch) presentation to SlideShare, a nifty way to share your presentations.

Our blogging colleagues at Virtualistic.nl keep a video blog on their site.

You can watch VMUG keynote and presentation ‘live’ from Nieuwegein (Netherlands) on their website.

Gerben Kloosterman put up a video of Eric Sloof while demoing Virtualization EcoShell at http://blog.virtualarchitect.nl

Pictures from Breakout session 2 by Bouke Groenescheij (Jume.nu) can be found here.

Breakouts in sessions 2:
- Virtualiseren van Exchange by Jan Willem Lammers – VMware
- How to monitor, manage & optimize a virtual environment by Danny Claproth – Vizioncore
- Project VRC by Ruben Spruijt – PQR/Jeroen van de Kamp – Login Consultants

Pictures from Breakout session 1 by Bouke Groenescheij (Jume.nu) can be found here.

Breakouts in sessions 1:
- VMware’s latest Virtual Desktop Infrastructure by Rory Clements – VMware
- Managing VMware vSphere 4 m.b.v. de Virtualization EcoShell by Eric Sloof – NTPro.nl
- Why the Virtual Data Center Starts with Compellent by Steven Dahlin – Compellent

For all the folks that didn’t hear about the EcoShell yet: The Virtualization EcoShell makes it possible to create scripts to automate management tasks for your virtual infrastructure, all from a user friendly user interface.

These scripts can be saved for later use.

This is not only good news for the lazy or time driven admin, but also from the point of making less mistakes. Actions can be run time after time at the same way.

The Virtualization EcoShell divides everything into the following actions:

• gather
• filter
• remediate
• report
• integrate

One of the items that is very interesting is vDiagram. vDiagram automagically creates a diagram of the items you want to report, for example which virtual machines are connected to what vSwitch.

Best Practice Filters are a great addition to the Virtualization EcoShell. For example: Give me all virtual machines with a connected CD-ROM drive that prevent VMotions. ESX hosts with NICs slower than 1GBit/s or VM’s with snapshots older than 7 days are part of the best practice filters.

Alan Renouf has put a lot of his PowerShell scripts he posted earlier on virtu-al.net in a PowerPack for the Virtualization EcoShell. vCheck is one of those things.

Eric has given a demo on his laptop. ESXi in a VMware Workstation 7 installation with a couple of virtual machines in it.

Without a line of programming or scripting he connects to the ESX host. Just by clicking he changes the connection of a couple of VMs to a different vSwitch.

If you want to change the code behind actions, no worry. Since everything is based on PowerShell commandlets you can change the code yourself.

Even creating your own PowerPack is very easy. As a demo Eric created a vmug PowerPack with a script he copied from the site from Alan. Sounds good, a vmug PowerPack.

Checkout  http://www.thevesi.org and ofcourse the site of Eric Sloof, ntpro.nl

Books that Eric mentioned in his presentation:

• vSphere Quick Start Guide
• Managing VMware Infrastructure with Windows PowerShell
• VMware VI and vSphere SDK

Twitter aliases to follow:

• carter shanklin @cshanklin
• alan renouf @alanrenouf
• hal rottenberg @halr9000
• luc dekens @LucD22
• Dmitry Sotnikov @DSotnikov
• hugo peeters @hugopeeters
• Arne Fokkema @afokkema
• Eric Sloof @esloof
• Scott Herold @vmguru

Scott Herold took the stage after Eric. He showed vRangerPro and the integration with the Virtualization EcoShell. From within the Virtualization EcoShell you are able to make charts from your backup times for example and use this in a monthly report.Even integration with vControl, a workflow application, is very easy from within the Virtualization EcoShell.

Scott is out in the exhibition hall to give more info and demo of the Virtualization EcoShell.

Keynote pictures by Bouke Groenescheij (Jume.nu) can be found here.

Today is the fifth Dutch VMUG event and the interest is overwhelming with 600 attendees.

VMGuru.nl attends for the first time this year, helping out with the event build up and attendee registration.

The first pictures can be found at the website of Bouke Groenescheij (Jume.nu).

9:30
The event is opened by Viktor van den Berg, followed by a video  message from VMware CTO, Steve Herrod.

9:45
Our third speaker is Richard Garsthagen, VMware’s Evangelist, talking about the road VMware has travelled in the last 11 years. As always Richard’s speeches are very enthusiastic and full of energy. He explains that VMware’s future is not all about virtual machines any more which is illustrated by their new logo where they stripped the three squares which represent virtual machines. VMware is becoming more and more about enabling companies to addept their IT to their business needs. So it’s not all about hypervisors and virtual infrastructure anymore it’s about enabling companies to becoming more flexible and thereby improving profit, quality and client satisfaction.

10:20
One way to do this is VMware’s implementation of the cloud and as Richard quotes Paul Maritz, ‘The cloud is not a destination but a way to do computing‘. At this moment it’s not possible yet to move a VM from your private cloud to a public cloud by a simple mouse click but it is already possible to run a VM in a service provider’s datacenter where you pay by use. But VMware is doing everything to make this possible in the future. One of the products VMware has released their first products to support this cloud idea namely vSphere 4 and CapacityIQ. The last products enables the pay by use model which is one of the prerequisites for the public cloud.

10:30
Richard finished with some nice tech news.

• VMware started with VMware Knowledge base TV
• Every Friday VMware NL launches an online webinar with every Friday new, different and interesting topics.
• VMworld Europe 2010 in Copenhagen will be much more oriented on networking.

Next up for me, the Scripting breakout session by Eric Sloof from NTPro.nl and Scot Herold from Vizioncore/VMGuru.com