From the editors Virtual Desk
Hi Everyone well almost the end of the first half of 2013. I certainly hope thus far it has been productive for you. For those that follow the newsletter and VMware in general you will no doubt have seen how many releases, updates and articles we have contributed to the community. This has also been an excellent half year for me personally with the completion of my IAAS exam which was a major goal for my learning and certification objectives.
I have had a small amount of time this week to start my lab up again and get some View practice which has been really good. I am really keen to get my desktop certification and find the desktop virtualisation environment very exciting right now and definitely on the up.
Enjoy the newsletter and the final week of the half year, as I write this it is the shortest day of the year so it only gets better and hopefully a bit warmer from here.
Best Wishes
Neil Isserow (Newsletter Editor)
Queensland Technical Account Manager
Newsletter Archive: communities.vmware.com/blogs/vmwaretam
TRAINING-SCHEDULE
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VMware View: Desktop Fast Track 01 - 05 July
VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage [V5.1] 08 - 12 July
VMWARE BLOGGERS
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- VMware Education & Certification Blog: Upcoming vCloud Best Practices workshops: Build your cloud design know-how, nowWhen you’re tackling the challenge of a VMware vCloud implementation for your organization or customer, you don’t need to do it alone. Even the most seasoned of engineers could use some guidance on cloud design best practices to help you save time, money and ensure a smoother project. VMware vCloud: Design Best Practices [V1.5] is designed to guide you through the decision points and policy choices available for designing and implementing a VMware vCloud environment. Learn to appreciate the effects of…
- VMworld Blog: VMworld 2013 Blog Series: Hands-On LabsTo celebrate our 10th annual VMworld, each week we'll be looking at a different facet of our event, from the evolution in VMware technology to our place as one of the world's largest IT conferences. For updates on VMworld 2013, please follow @VMworld on Twitter. Hands-On Labs at the first VMworld in 2004. Since 2004, Hands-On Labs (HOLs) at VMworld have been a key part of VMworld’s experiential learning. HOLs give attendees access to the latest VMware technologies. “It’s a benefit for users;…
- VMware vCloud Blog: Deep Dive into Disaster Recovery in the CloudThis is a guest post from vCloud Service Provider, Bluelock . Did you know that you can use the cloud to recover any VMware-virtualized application, even those you host internally? Did you know that when you use the cloud for recovery, that you can choose the point from which you recover, protecting you against data corruption? Do you know exactly how to leverage cloud-based DR to ensure geographic protection for any disruption? This Tuesday, June 25, 2013 at 2 p.m. Bluelock will break down…
- VMware vSphere Blog: Heads Up! Cannot Enable SIOC on NFS DatastoresThis is an interesting one for those of you considering using Storage I/O Control (SIOC) on NFS datastores. We’ve come across an issue a couple of times whereby SIOC fails to enable on an NFS datastore due to a permissions issue. The following messages are seen in the SIOC logs on the ESXi hosts sharing the datastore: 2013-06-10T11:53:08.147Z: Error in opening stat file for device: test.Ignoring this device. 2013-06-10T11:53:12.159Z: stat file /vmfs/volumes//test/.iormstats.sf already…
- VMware Cloud Ops Blog: VMware CloudOps Is Heading to Silicon Valley DevOps Days(Photo from DevOpsDays.org ) As you may have heard , we’ll be on-site in Santa Clara for this year’s DevOps Days , taking place tomorrow, June 21 st and this Saturday, June 22 nd . If you’re attending the conference, make sure to swing by our table to say hello and to learn more about VMware’s cloud operations solutions and services. We’ll be live tweeting from the show floor with exclusive photos and videos, and we’ll also be covering the following sessions: Day 1: 10:15-10:45 – DevOps +…
- VMware Hands On Labs Blog: Hands-on Labs: Where are the Installation Labs?Our goal is to build labs that are useful to you, our customer. To be honest, our secret evil plan is to get you to buy our products… but don’t tell anyone. Now, it would be really nice if we could put everything you might need into each lab and allow you to do anything you want inside the environment. Unfortunately, there are some limits to what we can offer while continuing to provide a consistent and positive experience. As an example of one of these limitations, we do not currently offer …
- VMware for Small-Medium Business Blog: Lower Your Capital and Ops Costs: Leverage Your VMware Profile Driven Storage to Gain Visibility into Your Storage Pool and Plan Aheadby Mike Rose, VMware SE, Mid-Market Team During my daily conversations with customers, I hear how IT leaders and staff are actively looking for ways to provision their applications and gain better visibility into their storage pools. With this in mind, I felt I should share what I’m hearing, and extend some highlights and tips. Highlights You Need to Know- VMware’s Profile Driven Storage With VMware’s profile driven storage you can quickly and intelligently provision applications while ensuring…
- VMware Support Insider: 10 videos on vSphere SnapshotsToday we have compiled two lists of videos that will provide you a clear understanding of how to use vSphere snapshots effectively . The first set comes from Joe Desmond, VMware Certified Instructor. The second list comes from our VMware KBTV YouTube channel. Those videos compliment our Knowledgebase articles on the same topic. vSphere Snapshots in Non Production Environments describes how to make changes in a non-production environment using vSphere snapshots, by using snapshots to compare two alternative…
- VMware vCloud Blog: vCloud Hybrid Service: Stop Thinking About Building a Cloud, Start Thinking About How to Conusme ItBy Massimo Re Ferre’ This is a repost from Massimo Re Ferre’s blog, IT 2.0 . Last month, VMware announced the vCloud Hybrid Service (aka vCHS) . I have been keeping an eye on how this idea developed internally for a certain amount of time. I have been more closely involved since December last year when I participated in some “sausage making” summits (boy, those things are scaring if you are not used to them). And then I started working full time on it since roughly February this year.…
- VMware Education & Certification Blog: VMware Lab Connect : Come play in our virtual sandbox.“I hear and I forget, I see and remember, I do and I understand.” This Confucian proverb may hold an important key in addressing today’s IT skills gap. According to the 2013 Gartner CIO Agenda Report , of the 2,053 CIOs surveyed, more than half reported shortages in talent relating to key digital technology skills, including enterprise architecture, business intelligence and analytics, security and risk management, and IT strategy and planning. I’ve talked before about the importance of…
- VMware Virtualization Management Blog: Now Available: vCenter Operations Management 5.7.1, with Hyperic 5.7!Last week, we not only launched vCenter Log Insight, which we are very excited about, we also released vCenter Operations Management Suite version 5.7.1 . This update includes vCenter Operations Manager 5.7.1 and vFabric Hyperic 5.7 . I wanted to point out a few highlights of these releases and walk you through some of the enhanced functionality, product integrations and platform updates. So let’s see the latest that we have for each product. vCenter Operations Manager provides you with operations…VMware vSphere Blog: Reporting on RPO Violations From vSphere Replication
- A commonly requested thing that people ask for from vSphere Replication is more consolidated reporting. You can set alerts in vCenter to key off of various things that surface from vSphere Replication, but it is not exactly a consolidated list when doing so. What people are looking for is a common interface to pull together *just* vSphere Replication alerts for things like RPO violations. My good friends and colleagues Alan Renouf and Lee Dilworth have identified a really elegant way to pull this…
- VMware Cloud Ops Blog: Workload Assessment for Cloud Migration, Part 1: Identifying and Analyzing Your WorkloadsBy: Andy Troup Conducting a thorough workload analysis can make or break the success of a cloud strategy. If you are successful with assessing workloads and placing them in the appropriate private, hybrid and public cloud environments, then this will help you fulfill your cloud strategy, thus helping you enable greater agility and cost efficiency. If your assessment is unsuccessful, then these benefits will be much harder to achieve and you could see higher costs, lower performance and unhappy…
- VMware vSphere Blog: “It’s a Unix system, I know this!”Every fellow geek who first saw Jurassic Park twenty years ago (Has it really been that long??) cringed when Lex Murphy sat down at a Silicon Graphics workstation and exclaimed the line above. I’m reminded of this line all the time when I talk to some customers who I find treat their ESXi systems like they would a Unix or Linux system. I’m here to tell you, it’s not. A shell does not an OS make Did you know you can run a Unix bash shell on Windows ? Heck, you can even run a Unix bash shell on…
- VMwareTV: The Journey to the Software Defined DatacenterThe Journey to the Software Defined Datacenter Jeff Hu, speaking at IBM Edge on June 10, 2013, describes the journey from virtualization to the software defined datacenter. From: vmwaretv Views: 180 3 ratings Time: 28:17 More in Science & Technology
- VMware Accelerate: Join Us For a Software-Defined Data Center Twitter Chat on June 27th 8am &11am PSTTweet Author: Rob Jenkins, Director VMware Accelerate Advisory Services EMEA We’ve been talking a lot lately about the software-defined data center (SDDC) as it relates to financial services , information security, and emerging IT cloud careers . As the Accelerate team meets with customers, we find that there are still many questions around how this infrastructure will eventually transform IT from the traditional model to one focused on business agility. And their business issues range from how to…
- VMwareTV: OpenStack with VMware vSphereOpenStack with VMware vSphere Demo by Scott Lowe of OpenStack Grizzly using VMware vSphere as well as VMware's Network Virtualization Platform (NVP) as a back-end. From: vmwaretv Views: 6 0 ratings Time: 16:57 More in Science & Technology
- VMware vSphere Blog: Preview – VMworld 2013 Extreme Performance Series: vCenter of the UniversePrevious entry: Preview – Extreme Performance Series: Monster Virtual Machines Next in our Extreme Performance Series mini-track, I’d like to highlight the following vCenter performance breakout. Remember, you’ll want to attend the whole series to learn about performance across the stack. VSVC5234 – Extreme Performance Series: vCenter of the Universe Ravi Soundararajan, Principal Engineer, VMware Justin King, Technical Marketing, VMware Deploying vCenter server correctly can be a daunting…
- VMwareTV: Granting a Cloned Administrator Role to a UserGranting a Cloned Administrator Role to a User This video shows that granting a clone of the ESXi Administrator role to a user does not mean a user can SSH into the ESXi shell. From: vmwaretv Views: 8 0 ratings Time: 00:37 More in Science & Technology
- VMwareTV: Grant ESXi Administrator Role to a UserGrant ESXi Administrator Role to a User This video shows the process of granting the ESXi Administrator Role to a user. From: vmwaretv Views: 35 1 ratings Time: 00:34 More in Science & Technology
- VMwareTV: Grant Shell Access for VMware ESXiGrant Shell Access for VMware ESXi This video shows that the "Grant access to this user" is a UI issue and not a security issue. From: vmwaretv Views: 75 1 ratings Time: 00:28 More in Science & Technology
- VMware Education & Certification Blog: Question of the Week: VCP5-DCVThis week’s “Question of the Week” comes from the VMware Certified Professional 5-Data Center Virtualization (VCP5-DCV) Official Study Guide . Which of the following cannot be added to a vApp? a. Host b. VM c. Resource Pool d. vService See below for the answer Not sure of the answer? You can learn more about this topic in our VMware vSphere: Install, Configure, Manage course. Answer: a. Host
- VMware for Small-Medium Business Blog: New Whitepaper: Finding the Right Virtualization and Cloud Vendor for Your BusinessMid-Market businesses face several challenges when implementing virtualization and cloud computing technology: limited IT budgets, mobile accessibility and security, scalability, and limited resources to plan for, adopt and learn new technology solutions. Choosing the right vendor to meet these needs is crucial, but evaluating the marketplace can be a daunting task for small to midmarket business decision makers. Technology analysis and consulting firm Taneja Group recently performed an analysis of the…VMware Consulting Blog: It All Starts Here: Internal implementation of Horizon Workspace at VMwareBy Jim Zhang , VMWare Professional Services Consultant VMware has had a dogfood tradition since previous CEO Paul Maritz’ instilled the practice of having VMware IT deploy VMware products for production use internally. As a VMware employee personally, I can understand some criticism to this practice, but I definitely believe it serves to build and deliver a solid and quality product to the market. Prior to the release of VMware’s Horizon Suite, VMware IT provided Horizon Workspace to its employees in…
- VMware Network Virtualization Blog: Network Virtualization in Action: Voonami Inc.Voonami, Inc., is located in Utah and offers services ranging from traditional co-location to fully hosted, managed cloud applications. Voonami is helping their enterprise customers transition from private cloud to hybrid cloud by simplifying the provisioning and replication of complex application environments. With their existing infrastructure, moving applications around and deploying new applications was costly and time consuming. Deploying network virtualization enabled Voonami to decouple the network…
- VMware vSphere Blog: Preview – Extreme Performance Series: Monster Virtual MachinesThis year at VMworld (both San Francisco and Barcelona) performance will be front and center. I’ve been working internally to create a “mini-track” of technically advanced performance breakouts with many of our actual performance engineers as speakers. Customers always want to know about best practices, troubleshooting and just how far vSphere can push the performance envelope and that’s very hard to do in a 60 minute session. So this year I’ve got approval to try something different. There…
- VMware vSphere Blog: Help us to help you and win a copy of VMware Fusion!Do you use VMware Auto Deploy? Is there a good reason you don’t use VMware Auto Deploy? Here at VMware we value our customers feedback and want to help make sure our product lines and features are in line with what is needed from your organization, as part of this we are trying to find out more details about how our customers use Auto Deploy, or if you don’t , how they don’t use Auto Deploy! As part of this we have created a survey which will help prioritize efforts in the future and give us a…
- VMware Virtualization Management Blog: Cloud Automation ROI – The business Impact of accelerating IT service deliveryImproved operational efficiency is certainly a compelling motivation for deploying a dynamic on-demand private cloud infrastructure. In fact, the automated service delivery capabilities of VMware’s cloud automation software have improved VMware customer’s operational efficiency by an average of 80% or more by utilizing resources on more strategic initiatives. However, if you were to ask our customers with a year or more of deployment experience what their biggest benefit was, the response would likely…
- VMware vSphere Blog: Grant shell access to this user? No worries mate!A few weeks ago I saw on an internal email thread an ask from a customer via their VMware sale engineer. The customer was using AutoDeploy and Host Profiles. As part of this process, they were creating a local user on their ESXi hosts and when they connected to the host via the vSphere Client application on Windows, they were worried to see that the user was created with Shell Access already granted! As you can imagine, that’s probably not something you want done by default. Even more so when you’re in…
- VMware vSphere Blog: Introduction to VMware VirstoWhat is VMware Virsto and What Does it Do? Since VMware’s acquisition of Virsto earlier this year, many customers and folks in the community have expressed a great deal of interest in the product. Since so many folks have requested more information about the product, I’ve decide to write a series of in-depth blog articles that will discuss VMware Virsto’s capabilities, benefits, and targeted use cases for the product. VMware Virsto is a software-defined storage solution design to optimize the use of…
- VMware Support Insider: Accessing VMware Downloads through My VMware (Updated)Back in April of this year we released the video: Accessing VMware Downloads through My VMware . The My VMware portal was updated last week and some new features were introduced. One such change in this new release was that of the process for accessing VMware Downloads through the site. Because the process had changed we updated both the content of the associated Knowledge Base article Accessing VMware downloads (2006993) and also the video tutorial demonstrating the process. The new video has been…
EXTERNAL BLOGGERS
- Design vCloud Director on VCE Vblock Systems - 2.0Almost a year and a half ago I teamed up with Chris Colotti and Jeremiah Dooley and we wrote the first version of vCloud Director on Vblock Design Considerations . Well, it was time for an update. Since that time VCE Vblock Systems have rapidly matured as well as vCloud Director itself. Introducing Designing VMware vCloud Director on Vblock Systems . This new version 2.0 of the paper was inspired by the first version but was written solely by me and a bit of help from VCE's graphic design team. Many…
- #vBrownBag Follow-up VMware Horizon Mirage with Chuck Mills (@vchuckmills)In part 1 of a 2 part series Chuck Mills takes us through an overview of VMware Horizon Mirage and live demo. Chuck will be back with us on July 24th to continue with the live demo and answer more of your questions. Also a special thanks to Chris Halstead for support all the great [...]
- 2013-06-13 ProfessionalVMware #vBrownBag LATAM #VCAP DCA 6.2 – Troubleshoot Memory Performance @elnemesisdivinaThe following content is in Spanish, the language in which the webinar is presented. El pasado 13 de junio 2013 en ProfessionalVMware #vBrownBag LATAM @elnemesisdivina presentó el tema #VCAP DCA 6.2 – Troubleshoot Memory Performance Recursos y respuestas a algunas preguntas del público durante la sesión: A: Understanding Memory Resource Management in vSphere 5http://blogs.vmware.com/performance/2011/09/understanding-memory-resource-management-in-vsphere-5.html [...]
- VMware KB Digest – New Articles Published for Week Ending 6/15/13In our effort to provide our viewers with up to the minute information on VMware related news and topics, we’re posting the following list of new KB Entries for this week, direct from VMware Support. Socialcast On Premise v2 Searching application or worker logs for actions and errors in Socialcast On Premise (2052601) Date Published: [...]
- All I Did Was Add a VMkernel Interface (Routing)That was the call I got today. "All I did was add a VMkernel interface and my host lost connection to vCenter". On went my troubleshooting hat. First the environment (simplified) The physical interfaces on which the VMkernel interfaces reside were trunked with multiple VLANs. In this case VLAN(4) and VLAN(49). vmk0 was used for ESXi management - with a default gateway of x.x.4.254 When the user added vmk1 - the host would become disconnected, he removed vmk1 - the host reconnected to the…
- Security in VMware Virtual AppliancesToday I got a reminder of a post I have been meaning to write about security best practices and VMware Virtual Appliances. A question was raised on the VMTN community VCSA - what is the default "upgrade" user for? That is a very legitimate question!! Giving a user all rights with no password can become an issue. But in this case since it is used (most probably) for the purpose of the upgrade of the VCSA from version to version - then it might OK (or not… ). Which leads straight into the next…
- Add Fusion IO driver to VMware Auto DeployA customer of mine, who was already running a vSphere environment on Cisco UCS blades, asked to expand his environment with a number of ESXi hosts that could run a VMware View environment. To be able to run as much View desktops on each host as possible, we offered them Cisco UCS Blades equipped with [...] See full post at: Add Fusion IO driver to VMware Auto Deploy
- Horizon View in a stretched cluster environment: Can I have that? No!Ever since VMware started selling View as a desktop solution, we’ve had these discussions with colleagues and customers. You probably are familiar with the topic: Many companies have more than one location, but they all want to manage their IT infrastructure as if it was one. So, if we can throw in a big data-line [...] Leave A Comment posted in Best Practices by Alex Muetstege
- PCoIP Log Viewer Now Supports VMware Horizon View 5.2 Log FilesGreat news PCoIP users, Chuck Hirstius (@rexremus) has finally got around to updating his invaluable PCoIP Log Viewer to support Horizon View 5.2 PCoIP log files. The PCoIP Log Viewer is extremely useful when working with Horizon View environments that are using PCoIP. Whether you are trying to troubleshoot a PCoIP issue or trying to [...] " PCoIP Log Viewer Now Supports VMware Horizon View 5.2 Log Files " originally appeared on The SLOG . - Follow Simon Long on Twitter: @SimonLong_ Related…
- Netapp’s VMware Horizon View 5 Solutions GuideI just heard that this document was released and just wanted to bring it to your attention. VMware Horizon View 5 Solutions Guide This solution guide outlines VMware View 5 on NetApp storage. The guide covers pool design, cloning choices, and guest optimization, as well as end-user data layout. New technologies that are available [...] " Netapp’s VMware Horizon View 5 Solutions Guide " originally appeared on The SLOG . - Follow Simon Long on Twitter: @SimonLong_ Related posts: VMware…
- Linked Clone Ad hoc space reclamation from allocated unused disk spaceHorizon View 5.2 leverages a new vSphere capability that implements a new disk format for VMs on VMFS that allow for grain reduction size & more efficiently utilization of allocated blocks by filling it with real data. Unused space is reclaimed and Linked Clone desktops stay small. These are blocks that were previously written but … Continue reading »
- Launching VDI Calculator v2 with XenDesktop supportApproximately 10 days ago I launched the new revamped VDI calculator, now using Java Framework, and I am now introducing the Release 2.0 with full support to XenDesktop calculations for VDI environments running on atop VMware vSphere hypervizor. Why? Because most Citrix XenDesktop deployments run atop of the VMware hypervizor platform. I would like to … Continue reading »
- Build Your Own “Desktop-as-a-Service”A little while back I have published blog posts and videos describing what a Desktop-as-a-Service architecture should look like. I was wrong! Well, let me put this way – there are multiple truths to the matter. In a previous article I said that DaaS solutions should oblige the following guidelines: Build upon the foundation … Continue reading »
- VMware Snapshots Explained through a video seriesI wanted to point out this technical learning video about VMware snapshots. This video is narrated by VMware certified instructor Joe Desmond and he explains all the details about the snapshot technology and the different files which are generated and used in snapshots. In my IT career I’ve encountered situations at client sites, where the [...] Read the full post VMware Snapshots Explained through a video series at ESX Virtualization . Featured Paper : Top 6 Tips for Configuring vSphere Resource Pools