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VMworld 2012 Live Blog of OPS-CIM1926 Must Know Design Considerations for Planning Capacity When You are 50 Percent or More Virtualized

Harley Stagner — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 21:47:30 +0000

This is the Live Blog of OPS-CIM1926 ? 5 Must Know Design Considerations for Planning Capacity When you are 50 Percent or More Virtualized. You’ll find my recap of the session below.

Speakers:

Samuel McBride – VMware, Inc.
Monica Sharma, VMware, Inc.

This session will discuss capacity planning. Monica Sharma is speaking now. The right management tools allow the ratio of VM per Admin to be much more efficient. We can manage more with fewer resources.

Capacity problem areas can get amplified with higher consolidation.

Performance Triage / Reactive Capacity Remediation – Over-commitment / Reservations tend to be common in larger environments
It is difficult to cross-reference multiple tools to obtain the most relevant information needed to troubleshoot
This leads to higher Mean Time to Resolution
Demand forecasting – This is all about capacity waste and stress
What are my used vs allocated resources?
Do I have the need for burst demand?
How can we stay ahead of demand?
How can we optimize efficiency …
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VMworld 2012 Live Blog of INF-VSP1168 – Architecting a Cloud Infrastructure

Harley Stagner — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 20:01:01 +0000

This is the Live Blog of INF-VSP1168 – Architecting a Cloud Infrastructure. You’ll find my recap of the session below.

Speakers / Moderator:

Chris Colotti- VCDX # 37 VMware, Inc. – Moderator
Aidan Dalgleish – VCDX # 10 VMware, Inc.
Duncan Epping – VCDX #007 VMware, Inc.
Rawlinson Rivera VCDX #86, VMware, Inc.

This will be a panel discussion. The session begins with “Gathering Requirements”

Talk to Customers

Gather information and document
Categorize (Requirements, Nice to Have, Constraints, Assumptions
Conceptualize

Great advice for consultants and anyone going for the VCDX certification.

Some Example Requirements

Increase agility / flexibility while reducing costs
99.9% Availability

Some Example Constraints

Hardware already acquired
Number of NICs dictated per server
Reuse existing equipment

Some Example Assumption

Sufficient switch ports
Storage can handle expected workload
Properly trained staff

Historical best practices

Understand why it is a best practice
It is better to put requirements first and apply the best practices to that requirement
Constantly evaluate best practices and question whether it still applies to newer software

Some Use Case Examples (The application comes first!)

Server consolidation
OPEX savings
Resource optimization
Standardization
IaaS

Conceptualize Your Design

Building Blocks – Operations, Time to Market, Compliance

Sizing / Scaling

What does the environment look like today?
How will size / scaling impact your Design / Project?
What is the use Case?

Again, all …
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VMworld 2012 Live Blog of INF-BCO2655 – VMware vSphere Fault Tolerance of Multiprocessor Virtual Machines – Technical Preview

Harley Stagner — Thu, 30 Aug 2012 04:20:03 +0000

This is the Live Blog of INF-BCO2655 – VMware vSphere Fault Tolerance for Multiprocessor Virtual Machines – Technical Preview. You’ll find my recap of the session below.

Speakers:

Jim Chow – VMware, Inc. Staff Engineer
Srinivas Kotamraju – VMware, Inc. Product Manager
Shrinand Javadekar – VMware, Inc. Senior MTS

Shrinand Javadekar has taken the stage and is discussing vSphere availability features to date (NIC-Teaming, HA, DRS, vMotion, storage multipathing, etc.). This session will concentrate on continuous availability with Fault Tolerance.

He goes on to define continuous availability

Zero downtime
Zero data loss
No loss of TCP connections
Completely transparent to guest software

One of the major limitations of Fault Tolerance as it exists today is the fact that FT can only protect uni-processor VMs. VMware has reached a key milestone in solving …
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VMworld 2012 – It’s All About the Sessions, Or Is IT?

Harley Stagner — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 20:58:36 +0000

For those of you who were concerned that I am working way too much at VMworld 2012, I thought I’d post a quick update on some of the other activities at VMworld. I know, it’s all about the fun sessions, right? Well, sometimes it’s about actual fun also. I’ve been assured that the management team at TBL will not read this post, so here goes nothing

The VMworld 2012 Hang Space

This is probably one of the coolest rooms at VMworld 2012. All those worn and weary from the barrage of sessions can relax and take it easy amongst fellow virtualization enthusiasts. They even have a “Charging Valet” where you can drop your device off to be charged while you relax. Pretty cool.

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VMworld 2012 Live Blog of INF-VSP2448 Automating Bare Metal to the Cloud and Beyond

Harley Stagner — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 19:48:41 +0000

This is the Live Blog of INF-VSP2448 – Automating Bare Metal to the Cloud and Beyond. You’ll find my recap of the session below.

Speakers:

Alan Renouf – VMware, Inc. Senior Technical Marketing Architect
Eric Williams – Cisco Systems, Inc. Technical Marketing Engineer
Jake Robinson – BlueLock Solutions Architect

Alan Renouf is on the stage and talking about the history of PowerShell and PowerCLI. PowerCLI will be the basis for the automation featured in the presentation. He is discussing some basic PowerShell and PowerCLI cmdlets and how easy it is to create scripts by piping cmdlets into other cmdlets.

PowerCLI Snap-In’s available in the latest PowerCLI release include:

Core – Managing vSphere
Image Builder – Image Profiles
Auto Deploy – Deploying ESXi via PXE
License – Working with vSphere Licensing
Cloud – vCloud Director Providers
Tenant (new in 5.1) – vCloud Director Tenants – You can give these to your cloud tenants

PowerCLI 5.1 – What’s New?

Core

Kerberos
Linked clones
Datastore clusters
VCloud object relation

Cloud

Organization …
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VMworld 2012 Live Blog of INF-NET2161 – VMware Networking 2012 – Enabling the Software Defined Network

Harley Stagner — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 18:45:47 +0000

This is the Live Blog of INF-NET2161 – VMware Networking 2012 – Enabling the Software Defined Network. You’ll find my recap of the session below.

Speakers:

Milin Desai – VMware, Inc. – Product Management, Networking
Sachin Thakkar – VMware, Inc. – Manager, Networking and Security R&D

Software Defined Networking must provide an abstraction layer for the network similar to the way there is a hardware abstraction layer for virtual machines today. The goal is an operationally efficient environment to provision networks quickly and on-demand. With the release of vSphere 5.1 you can define logical networks with features such as vShield Edge, App, and Endpoint, and utilizing vXLAN technology. The vCloud ecosystem framework will allow 3^rd party partners to participate in Software Defined Networking with their own solutions. You can configure a vDC in minutes.

Deployment Scenario

Create …
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VMworld 2012 Live Blog – General Session Day 2

Harley Stagner — Tue, 28 Aug 2012 17:11:48 +0000

This is the Live Blog of the VMworld 2012 General Session Day 2. You’ll find my recap of the session below.

Steve Herrod, CTO, VMware, Inc. is on the stage now. He’s recapping the general session from yesterday about VMware’s strategic direction towards true cloud infrastructure. Today he is talking about end user computing and access to data in new and different ways.

“The days of telling users what to do are over.”

Three phases of transforming end user computing

Transform legacy applications into a service that can be consumed by users
Broker services
Mobile Users

Transformation

VMware View is a big component of this transformation. With View 5.1 there are more clients for more devices. The user experience is vastly improved. There was even a 3D-Gaming experience running on View desktops in the Hands on Labs. He is announcing a partner ecosystem of appliances like the Cisco ISR G2 plus VMware View for branch office View deployments.

Up next is Mirage. This is a technology that is brought to us by a recent VMware acquisition. Mirage helps to break apart the desktop into distinct components and allows offline access from a managed physical or virtual desktop. Mirage allows in place upgrade to Windows 7 in the background while a snapshot is taken of the machine. After the upgrade, the user reboots and they have windows 7. Mirage also has a copy of a user’s devices and can restore them as a virtual machine. Demo recap.

User starts with Windows XP
Mirage does in place upgrade of Windows 7 …
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VMworld 2012 Live Blog of INF-BCO2155 vCloud DR for Oxford University Computing Services – Real World Example

Harley Stagner — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 23:19:00 +0000

This is the Live Blog of the VMworld 2012 INF-BCO2155 – “vCloud DR for Oxford University Computing Services. You’ll find my recap of the session below.

The presenters for this session are:

Aidan Dalgleish – VMware, Inc. Consulting Architect and a fellow VCDX
Gary Blake – VMware, Inc. Senior Consultant
Adrian Parks – Oxford University Computing Services Senior Systems Administrator

This session will discuss the disaster recovery for provider vDC’s in vCloud Director. The solution becomes more complex in the absence of L2-stretched networks (clusters). VCloud Director works with managed objects, so it is absolutely essential that everything in the infrastructure be restored in their current state. Any rebuilds will break the managed object relationships.

Adrian Parks will go over the challenges and requirements for Oxford Computing Services.

Over 300 independent units that each do their own thing
Devolved IT infrastructure
No central mandate

The University now operates a private cloud, offering Infrastructure As A Service to those 300 “independent units.”

Goals for the project:

Primary – Protect “Shared Datacenter Virtual Infrastructure Environment” from site failure
Secondary – …
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VMworld 2012 Live Blog of INF-NET2166 – How I Built My SDN-Based Cloud

Harley Stagner — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 20:52:33 +0000

This is the Live Blog of the VMworld 2012 INF-NET2166 – “How I Built My SDN-Based Cloud.” You’ll find my recap of the session below.

The presenters for this session are:

Justin Giardina, iland
Jesse Morgan, Peak 10
Adina Simu, VMware
Omar Torres, VeriStor Systems

Jesse Morgan, Peak 10 is up first. He will be discussing the Peak 10 cloud firewall offering. Challenges for firewall offering.

Shared

No VPN, No SSL-VPN
No overlapping of internal customer IP spaces
No load balancing

Dedicated

Physical device sprawl
Many connections

Peak 10 installed vShield Edge in their lab. The latest beta version 694615 of vShield Edge offers:

VPN
Load Balance HTTP
SSL-VPN
10 interfaces
Load Balance HTTPS
Load Balance TCP
HA
Large and Compact Appliance
Configurable Load Balancing Health Checks

The Peak 10 testing infrastructure includes:

Cisco UCS B230 M2 – Good to see
EMC VNX 5300
2 Web Servers
Load generator
Edge appliance

VMware has continually improved the performance of vShield Edge through the different versions. The …
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VMworld 2012 General Session Live Blog

Harley Stagner — Mon, 27 Aug 2012 17:06:11 +0000

This is the Live Blog of the VMworld 2012 General Session. You’ll find my recap of the session below.

CEO Paul Maritz is on the stage, introduced by Chief Marketing Officer, Rick Jackson. Statistics say that in 2012 60% of all x86 workloads worldwide are virtualized. In 2008 we were asking what is the cloud. In 2012, we are asking how do we transform our operations into a cloud infrastructure.
Maritz continues to say that we need to look at new ways to provide access to information to users. It’s all about giving the information to users whenever, wherever they are and in the context that they need. IT transformation happens in three broad categories:

• Infrastructure – Moving from physical to virtual to cloud
• Application transformation – Moving from desktop to web. Providing big data in manageable contexts.
• End User Computing – Moving from desktop / laptop access to any device, anywhere. Mobile users.

Paul Maritz has officially announced that he is handing over the stewardship of VMware to Pat Gelsinger as new CEO. Pat Gelsinger is on the stage now. He is talking about the Software Defined Datacenter.

As much as we have progressed, we still have silos: Windows, Linux, Databases, Mission Critical, Big Data, HPC. The Software Defined Datacenter is about bringing all of these different silos under one unified infrastructure / datacenter operating system. VMware is announcing the vCloud Suite to deliver and manage the Software Defined Datacenter.

VMware is announcing vSphere …
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