VMworld 2010 – Storage Super-Heavyweight Challenge (TechHead)
VMworld 2010 Session – “Building an Affordable vSphere Environment for a Lab or Small Business” (TechHead)
Maritz on vCloud Datacenter (Musings of Rodos)
TA8037: vApps, OVF, and Advanced VM Templates (Scott Lowe)
DV7706: View Composer Technical Deep Dive and Best Practices (Scott Lowe)
MA6580: Bridge the ESX/ESXi Management Gap with vMA (Scott Lowe)
TA8233: Prioritizing Storage Resource Allocation Using Storage I/O Control (Scott Lowe)
EA7849 – Exchange Server 2010 on vSphere (It’s Just Another Layer)
Dan Anderson is my hero! (VMworld update) (Virtual Insanity)
The Land of Milk and Bunnies: Day 1 of VMworld (vtacit.com)
VMworld session DV7907: View Reference Architecture (VM Junkie)
VMworld sesson DV7180 – ThinApp Futures (VM Junkie)
VMworld session TA7805 – Tech Preview: Storage DRS (VM Junkie)
VMworld 2010 – TA8623 “Storage Super-Heavyweight Challenge” (Virtual Geek)
VMworld 2010 – EMC Supersession (Virtual Geek)
VMworld 2010 – TA8101 (Virtual Geek)
VMworld 2010 – VCE Supersession (Virtual Geek)
VMworld 2010 – TA8051 (Virtual Geek)
VMworld 2010 – TA9820 (Virtual Geek)
VMworld 2010 – TA8133 (Virtual Geek)
August 2010 archive
Aug 13 2010
Sessions & Labs
Aug 13 2010
New vChat video posted
I participate in a weekly video podcast called vChat along with Simon Seagrave (techhead.co.uk) and David Davis (vmwarevideos.com). Each week we discuss certain topics related to virtualization for about 30 minutes. This weeks episode (vChat #3) we discuss home labs and give advice and our experiences with building our own home labs. So head on over there and check out the latest episode as well as past episodes, you can also subscribe via iTunes.
Aug 12 2010
Tackling esxtop for VMware performance management prowess
While the vSphere client provides performance data, the esxtop and resxtop performance utilities offer more advanced information to ease virtualization troubleshooting efforts. In this tip, we focus on using esxtop and resxtop; but the same performance statistics can be viewed from the vSphere client. Esxtop and resxtop run in a shell session, and manual coding can be intimidating. But don’t let the format discourage you. Once you get used to the controls and how to interpret the data, these tools become invaluable for reading how CPUs handle the workloads of hosts and virtual machines (VMs).
Esxtop vs. resxtop
While esxtop runs only inside an ESX service console — either directly at the console or remotely using a secure shell console –resxtop is a remote version of esxtop. Resxtop is included in the Linux version of the vSphere command line interface (CLI) and is part of the vSphere Management Assistant (vMA). Esxtop and resxtop function the same way and provide the same information, but resxtop supports only the interactive and batch modes and cannot be run in replay mode.
Read the full article at SearchVMware.com…
Aug 09 2010
vSphere networking features: Distributed vSwitches; private VLANs; IPv6
VMware’s vSphere 4 brings a number of new vSphere networking features to the table, including tighter VM traffic management and control with the vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS) , as well as support for third-party virtual switches (vSwitches). Along with that come a new high-performance virtual NIC, VMXNET3, the ability to create private VLANs and support for IPv6.
Implementation and benefits of private VLANs with a vSphere network
Private VLANs allow communication between VMs on a vSwitch to be controlled and restricted. This feature, which is normally available on physical switches, was added only to the vDS and not the standard vSwitch. Normally, traffic on the same vSwitch port group has no restrictions and any VM in that port group can see the traffic from other VMs. Private VLANs restrict this visibility and in essence act as firewalls within the VLAN. Private VLANs must first be configured on the physical switch ports of the uplink NICs on the vDS. Private VLANs are then configured by editing the settings of a vDS and selecting the Private VLANs tab.
Read the full article at searchnetworking.com…
Aug 09 2010
Virtualized infrastructure design for vSphere
If designing a physical server is similar to designing a house, designing a virtualized infrastructure is almost like designing a small city. There are lots of interrelated components, and you have to make many critical design decisions to ensure that all of the residents’ needs are met properly.
If you don’t properly account for water, gas and electric needs, for example, your houses won’t have the resources they need for basic services and peak loads. Similarly, when designing a virtualized infrastructure for customers, solutions providers need to size the storage, network, CPU and memory resources correctly, or the virtual machines (VMs) will not have the resources they need to run applications.
Besides hardware resources, you have to make other decisions when designing a vSphere virtualized infrastructure, many of which will dictate your hardware requirements. The vSphere features you’ll need are often tied to the type of server hardware you use. If you do not make the correct hardware decisions when designing your customer’s virtual environment, you may find that you cannot use some of vSphere’s features. Therefore, it’s important to understand vSphere’s requirements and limitations early on in your design phase.
Read the full article at searchsystemschannel.com…
Aug 09 2010
Assigning vSphere security access controls
Security is critical in a vSphere environment. Virtual machine (VM) architecture, access methods and management is much different from that for physical servers. Because VMs are encapsulated into a single file that resides on a shared data store, additional attack vectors need to be secured. Further, any change or operation in a virtual environment can have a ripple effect on other residing VMs because all share common infrastructure components. Consequently, having proper security access controls in place is paramount to protect hosts and their VMs.
Because they have multiple components, virtual environments are secured in layers. You can do much of the work to secure an environment through vCenter Server, which provides centralized authentication and authorization services at many different levels inside vSphere. VCenter Server features four main components:
- Privileges. A privilege enables or denies users access to perform actions in vSphere.
- Roles. A role is a set of privileges that can be assigned to a user or group.
- Users and groups. Users and groups are used in permissions to assign roles from Active Directory (AD) or local Windows users/groups.
- Permissions. A permission is assigned to an object in vSphere and is composed of users/groups and a role.
Read the full article at searchsystemschannel.com…
Aug 09 2010
Data backup application choices for backing up virtual server environments
Traditional data backup procedures used with physical servers typically consist of using an operating system (OS) agent running on each server to be backed up. But virtualization technology changes everything, and introduces more options and flexibility when backing up your servers.
This article will look at how data backup applications that were originally developed to back up physical systems and how they have adapted to support virtual server environments. You’ll also learn about data backup applications that were developed specifically for virtualization, and additional methods that are available for backing up virtual machines (VMs).
Read the full article at searchdatabackup.com…
