• Do you need a Lab? Here is your chance

    Do you need a Lab? I know that I do. I was blessed for years with access to a corporate lab. This lab was a critical piece of my infrastructure, it is where I tested new things, practiced and mastered new skills. Without my lab I would not be where I am today, I doubt I would have my VCP and other certifications and definitly not as quickly without access to that lab. There is a giveaway in progress but you must act fast to jump on this great oppurtunity.

    Recently when I left my previous company I lost access to that resource and that is sorely missed. I am slowly working on getting pieces for my lab but I don’t expect it to be complete until the latter part of next year. So I ask, do you need a lab, if so your in luck BrownBag sessions have put together a giveaway that you can enter by sending in a short video of who you are and why you need a lab. I highly recommend entering this contest and following the brownbags if your interested in VMware certifications and knowledge.

    http://professionalvmware.com/2011/12/brownbag-blow-out-vsphere-lab-give-away/

    Things you could win. Go to the official site above for more information but do so quickly, the contest ends at MIDNIGHT on 12/13.

    Books:

    Yes, books. In fact a small vSphere library to get you started down the road. Each one of the books is being contributed by their author or through the author to the publisher.

    Video

    Possibly the best vSphere video training out there (and not just because they’re sponsors), but because from personal experience, they’re damn good.

    Gear:

    Yes, gear. What kind of learning experience would it be if we gave you all this wonderful stuff to learn about and nothing to practice on. In that vein we’ve had a number of vendors step up and contribute some gear.

    Software

    How else to test it, but with some software.

    • Thanks to Jason Langer for throwing in a copy of VMware Workstation! Boom!
    • Also, John Troyer from VMware has thrown in a 365 Day Eval of vSphere and a full license of VMware Fusion

    Live Training

    Exam Vouchers

    Courtesy of Jon Hall at VMware, we have 5x VCP Vouchers to hand out. 1 to the winner, 4 to some random runners up.

    Accessories!

    What lab would be complete without some accessories? Jason Boche is going to throw in for a vCalendar!

    Make sure you enter soon, the contest ends MIDNIGHT ON 12/13


  • VCP 5 Resources: How I intend to Pass

     A friend and ex-coworker recently asked me for resources on obtaining his VCP, I currently hold my VCP4 and I am planning to take the VCP5 early next year, prior to the end of February, more on why this date is important later. The VMware VCP is the entry level certification to showcase your skills with VMware vSphere and supporting products. For my reference and for others I thought I would summarize the resources, such as blogs, books videos etc that I am using to prepare for the VCP5 exam.

    Start at the official certification site and examine the blueprint, take the practice tests. Going through these materials and official documentation will help provide the necessary foundation to pass the VCP5. Make sure you have also met the requirements for sitting the exam including any classes. The class requirement is waved for existing VCP4 until February 29th 2012

    Official Links

    One of the best write ups I have seen as of yet for obtaining your certification is How to Pass VCP5 by Greg Stuart, This site can walk you through what you need from beginning to end. Many of the same links that I include here are also referenced on the site below.

    I would also recommend Damian Karlson’s aka @sixfootdad on twitter blog for a solid comparison of  VCP4 vs VCP5 item by item as a critical resource.

    Blog / prep guide on preparing for VCP5. Many good articles on the site

    Additional Practice test and resources can be found on Simon Long’s blog AKA the SLOG

    Condensed vSphere5 documentation and notes by Forbes Guthrie

    There is also a community supported weekly series of blogs centered on VMware certifications called Brownbags. Recordings are available online and topics include VCP5 certification and much much more. I highly recommend listening to these and joining into the podcasts as they happen, you might even have a laugh and more importantly learn something.

    Books I am using as reference material (in no particular order)

    This list of resources will get you started and is by no means comprehensive. I would also highly recommend joining twitter if you haven’t already. The VMware community is very active and has some great minds that you can learn from and are happy to help you. For a list of VMware resources to follow, I highly recommend this list of VMware vExperts as a start to follow.

    vExperts are defined as individuals who have significantly contributed to the community of VMware users over the past year. vExperts are book authors, bloggers, VMUG leaders, tool builders, and other IT professionals who share their knowledge and passion with others. These vExperts have gone above and beyond their day jobs to share their technical expertise and communicate the value of VMware and virtualization to their colleagues and community


  • VUM VMware Update Manager

    Time after time I walk into new places and I am surprised to find that they patch their VMware environment manually if at all, sometimes they are aware of VMware’s free utility to update hosts and sometimes they are not. VMware Update Manager (VUM) is a free tool bundled with your vSphere licenses to help simplify and update your VMware infrastructure.

    Key features of VUM are listed below

    • Automated remediation of patches and upgrades for VMware vSphere hosts, as well as for third-party updates from storage and server vendors. Snapshots ensure the ability to roll back in case of patching failures, and a new automatic notification service makes certain that the most current version of a patch is available on the Update Manager server.
    • A compliance dashboard provides visibility into the patch and upgrade status of hosts and virtual machines for compliance to static or dynamic baselines.
    • Preflight cluster-level checklists report on remediation readiness before you deploy patches.
    • Deploy offline bundles. vSphere Update Manager can deploy patches that are downloaded directly from a vendor website, including drivers, CIM and other updates from hardware vendors for VMware vSphere hosts.
    • Orchestrated datacenter upgrades use a host upgrade baseline at a cluster, folder or datacenter level. A virtual machine upgrade baseline can also be used to upgrade virtual machine hardware and VMware Tools at once.
    • Secure offline virtual machine patching to reduce the risks associated with non-compliant systems joining the corporate network
    • Patch staging and scheduling for remote sites to reduce bandwidth usage and make patching even easier.
    • Integration with vSphere DRS for non-disruptive patching of VMware vSphere hosts.
    • Virtual Appliance Upgrades let administrators use pre-defined baselines or create custom baselines to scan and upgrade a virtual appliance to the latest virtual appliance version.
    • Integration with the vSphere Power CLI lets administrators use PowerShell commands to automate patch management directly from a command line

    Resources:
    Official VUM Page – http://www.vmware.com/products/update-manager/overview.html
    Installation Blog/Video – http://www.vladan.fr/vsphere-5-installing-vum-vmware-update-manager/
    VUM Set up Cheat sheet – http://blog.aarondelp.com/2009/01/vmware-update-manager-set-up-cheat.html

    Installation Video


  • VMTN Subscription – Thoughts & Another Proposal of How

    Recently there has been a lot of talk from the community regarding bringing back the VMTN subscription, this is a software based subscription very similar to Technet subscriptions for annaul licensing for non production environments for personal use. Mike Laverick and Josh Atwell and many more have been very vocal about bringing back VMTN.

    I never got to take advantage of the VMTN subscription (though I would have as it would have saved me a lot of time and rebuilds). I have taken advantage of Technet subscriptions for licenses and I have found it invaluable to have the licenses for software in my labs over the years. I will gladly pay the subscription fee for this licensing and I am sure many others would as well.

    Josh Atwell compiled a list of VMTN related post here. VMware is very good at listening to their customers as showcased recently in the vRam Licensing where the community did not think the initial vRam allocations were sufficient, VMware came back in short order and doubled the allocations. Recently regarding the VMTN subscription, Duncan Epping posted on Yellow Bricks that VMware is looking into their options of how to bring back VMTN subscription and how it would work.

    Please contribute and post your thoughts on the official community forum regarding VMTN
    http://communities.vmware.com/message/1857571#1857571

    Josh Atwell put together a suggested proposal of how he would like to see VMTN work, mine would be a variation of his design.

    VMTN Proposal

    2 Levels of VMTN

    • Admin 
    • Pro

    No media, download only
    VMTN Admin (~$200/year)

    • 1 year license Key. Renewable with new License Key 
    • 1 vCenter Server Max 
    • 3 ESXi Host Max
    • Enterprise Plus feature set available

    VMTN Desktop Admin (~$200/year)

    • 1 year license key
    • 1 year license Key. Renewable with new License Key
    • 1 vCenter Server Max
    • 3 ESXi Host Max
    • 10-15 Desktop Max
    • Desktop License feature set available

    VMTN Pro (~$400-$500/year)

    • 1 Year timer. Renewable with new license key
    • 4 vCenter Server Max
    • No ESXi Host Max
    • No Desktop Max
    • All VMware software available, including vCloud Director, Site Recovery Manager,
    • View, etc.

     May also be interesting to include:
    VMTN Mobile(~200/year)
    Horizon mobile applications once defined, released, and made GA.
    Reward the community

    • Provide 3 month trial of VMTN Admin to people when they successfully complete a required VCP prerequisite courses (ICM, etc.)
    • Provide 1 year of VMTN Admin upon succesful compltion of VCAP
    • Provide Lifetime VMTN Pro subscription to VCDX certification recipients.
    • Provide 1 year of VMTN Pro to vExperts for each year they are selected vExpert
    • Provide Vouchers to VMUG for VMTN Admin to be used as giveaways.

     Other thoughts

    • Clearly all licenses not for Production
    • As long as someone stays current in the programs described there should be no rebuild required. 
    • Upgrade license keys should be made available with new versions.
    • Beta programs remains completely separate.
    • Perhaps provide email only support for VMTN Pro subscription holders for their non-prod environments with Support level defined lower so as to not impact critical customer queues.

  • UBERAlign – Free tool to Align your VMware Environment

    UBERAlign is a new tool by Nick Weaver aka @lynxbat on twitter that promises to help us align our entire VMware environment. Disk Alignment is a critical issue where the storage doesn’t align with the Operating system causing severe performance impact. One of the best articles I have read on the impact of Disk Alignment can be found on TCPdump. This affects all VMs and the effects are staggering, proper disk alignment can improve performance from 10%-40% on average over a non aligned volume.

    Now back to the tool UBERAlign, this is a very powerful tool that can not only align your enviornment but assist in disk reclamation using thin provisioning.

    Quoted from “Nickapedia.com”  below are the features. Also check out the link at the bottom of the page for his official site and links to download. There are several videos that I highly recommend watching.

    Features:

    • Allows for fast alignment checking of virtual machines with detailed logging.
    • Can perform alignment to any offset you want. Even the crazy ones that you shouldn’t choose.
    • Works with both Windows 2000/XP/2003/2008 (NTFS) and Linux Distros (EXT2/EXT3/EXT4).
    • Is able to work on NTFS boot drives perfectly. It does this by rewriting NTFS Metadata (the right way).
    • Auto detects Windows 2008 and Windows 7 native installs (alignment not needed). Will not touch a System Reserved Partition (important for Windows 2008).
    • Preserves all Windows drive mapping (AFAIK only one to do so). This means no having to remap drive letters and complete support for non “C:”  system drives with some Windows builds (some Citrix stuff).
    • Doesn’t trash the NTFS and Boot mirrors like other tools.
    • Handles Primary and Extended partitions like it is no big deal on both Windows and Linux.
    • Has the ability to handle multiple disks for a VM.
    • Multiple disks + Multiple Partitions + Multiple types (primary, logical) + Multiple file systems (NTFS, EXT#) =  no problem
    • Also allows for optional Space Reclamation on both NTFS and Ext! That’s right: you can choose to do space reclamation at the same time as an alignment or as a option to itself. This means you can retrieve space no longer used on Thin VM’s using UBERAlign.
    • Operational model allows for completely CONCURRENCY with processing VMs. You can run up to 6 simultaneous jobs per Console and as many Consoles as your VCenter can handle. This was designed to allow people with big environments to process through a large set of VM’s.
    • Options to check, align, or reclaim any choice of disks in a VM.
    • Powerful very simple to use graphic console and easy to deploy OVA’s.
    • Orchestration for batch operations allowing you to process groups of VM’s with just a couple clicks.
    • Getting started is simple with just entering VCenter credentials/IP and pointing at a vAligner.
    • Space Reclamation should also help with possibly speeding up defragmentation of some NTFS file systems after. Your mileage may vary.
    • Space Reclamation can help you turn a thick VM into a thin one and actually get the space back!
    • Does all operations IN-PLACE! My first big goal was this. No more having to copy disks using the ESX command line(especially since ESX is going away). This will process a VM’s disks in-place.
    • Automatically makes a snapshot before running for failback. If you turn on your VM to check it and see anything you don’t like you can simply revert to the UBERAlign snapshot and be right back. (You should always have a backup and test also, see prereqs)
    • Automatically rolls the snapshots back if it sees an error. UBERAlign has the ability to do health check throughout the jobs and if it sees something wrong it will roll back it’s own snapshots for you.
    • Automatically enables CHKDSK scanning on each NTFS volume on the next boot.
    • Completely Storage Array agnostic. That’s right: if it connects to vSphere and host storage UBERAlign will work with it. This includes local disks (see prereqs below) and arrays other than EMC. Don’t say that the EMC vSpecialists don’t love all VMware users.
    • Completed tested against vSphere 4.1 / 5 environments.

    So as you can see UBERAlign got to be a bit of a beast along the way.
    2UBERAlign comes in two pieces. The UBERAlign Console which is a graphical interface meant to be run on a Windows XP/7/Server system with .Net 4.0 or greater. And the UBERAlign vAligner vAppliance which is deployed from OVA into a vSphere environment. The console connect to the vSphere via SOAP and to up to 6 vAligners via REST interface. The way it works is: each vAligner can process VM’s on the storage the vSphere Host it lives on has access to. So you should spread vAligners across clusters and make sure one is on any vSphere Host that has local storage you want to access.
    These features are meant to make the life of a VMware admin much easier when taking on this kind of task. But, let me cover some prereqs and how-to information.
    Prerequisites/Tips/Caveats:

    • All VM’s must be turned off to run any operation on. I won’t go into detail on why in-place + on is risky but suffice to say I wasn’t going to give it to you Smile
    • Console has been tested on Windows 7 SP1 and Windows 2008 R2. You need the very latest .Net 4.0 updates also.
    • As said above: only VM’s powered off and residing on storage visible to an attached vAligner will be selectable. You don’t have to restart the console but it may take up to 60 seconds for you to see a newly turned off VM.
    • Only vAligners managed by the VCenter you connected will be useable. One VCenter per console.
    • Concurrency is based on the VM level. Which means each vAligner can handle and process through different VMs. But, a single VM with multiple disks will not be split across multiple vAligners. They will process in a linear fashion one at a time.
    • If UBERAlign detects an error on a VM disk when a previous disk was processed it will revert the previous jobs also. This is because snapshots are handled at a VM-level.
    • When doing multi-disk Windows VM’s it is recommended to align them all and to use the same offset. When the System disk is processed it assumes all the disks will be done and at the same offset. You don’t HAVE to do this but you may have to remap drive letters otherwise (not a huge deal, just annoying).
    • In order for Space Reclamation to work you must boot VM (check that it is healthy), delete all snapshots, svMotion to a different datastore while specifying that you want it thin (important). Another option is to clone the existing VM from a power off state to a new VM on another datastore while 1specifying Thin for the disk format.
    • By default *Natively* installed Windows 2008 and Windows 7 installs don’t need alignment. Upgrades from Windows 2003 do. But Space Reclamation works on all of them.
    • Space Reclamation does make alignment jobs take about 15-20% longer. It all depends on the speed of the storage underneath.
    • You need to have at least 20% free space on any NTFS volume to safely align/reclaim. This can be less on a very large volume but is a safe rule to follow. If you have to, expand a drive to make a little extra room. The alignment check reports information you can use to check.
    • vAligners currently pick up a DHCP address. You can view what the address has become by looking at the info pane in VCenter. Or you can set an IP manually. The vAligners are running Ubuntu and the login is root/UBERAlign.
    • I have tested the console over WAN (Texas –> North Carolina) and it works very well.

    *DISCLAIMER*
    Ok, before I go any further I want to mention one important thing. UBERAlign is an experimental tool and carries no support from EMC Corporation or myself (Nicholas Weaver). It is being released in beta state and while it does have functions that allow for failback you should only perform operations on Virtual Machines for which you have a solid backup. Also, I recommend you test in your lab thoroughly to make sure you understand it fully. You accept full responsibility when you use this tool.
    *DISCLAIMER*

    Links


  • VMware Flings – Free tools by VMware

    Today during the weekly VMware Communities Roundtable, a weekly online forum for VMware experts where we get together and talk about virtualization topics, the VMware flings were mentioned and how they are not as well known or advertised as they should be. I am going to attempt to rectify this mistake and share this with the community.

     

    VMware flings are tools created by VMware labs. These engineers work on these flings Why flings? A fling is a short-term thing, not a serious relationship but a fun one. Likewise, the tools that are offered here are intended to be played with and explored. None of them are guaranteed to become part of any future product offering and there is no support for them. They are, however, totally free for you to download and play around with them!

    Today during the roundtable we talked about the the VDSPowerCLI fling, I recently blogged about PowerCLI here and this new fling has cmdlets to manage your VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch. This is a great addition that the community has been asking for. For more information about this particular fling, check out Alan Renouf’s blog.

    I have had some experience with several of these flings, here are a few of my favorite flings.

    There are many great flings so keep an eye out. I will post some here as new ones come out that catch my eye. Some of these products get integrated in new versions, some never go any further.

    Links
    VMware Flings


  • VMware HA: Isolation Response

    A friend of mine asked me to blog about VMware HA, specifically isolation response. Much of my knowledge comes from Duncan Epping’s books on HA/DRS and his website Yellow Bricks. This post is targeted at vSphere 4.1 environments. I will include links to his blog and specific books to more HA resources at the end of this blog and information regarding vSphere 5.

    Isolation Response is the action a host takes when it determines its been isolated as part of an HA enabled cluster. There are three actions that a vSphere 4 environment can take when a failure is detected. I will explore each of these settings in more detail below.

    • Leave Powered On (default)
    • Power Off
    • Shut down

    This setting can be changed on the cluster properties as shown in the screen shot below.

    Leave Powered On: Leaves the VMs powered On in an HA event, this is the default option. This can help in the situation to mitigate against false positives such as a network failure but host/datastore are not impacted.

    Power Off: Initiates a hard stop to the guest immediatly powering them off. This is a hard stop.

    Shut Down: Initiates a graceful shut down of the guests on the host during an HA event. This can take some time to complete depending on the state of the VMs VMware tools is a requirement for this to work, if this has not competed after 5 minutes a Power Off is initiated.

    In all of these cases HA will attempt to restart the VM on another host in the cluster. If it is simply an isolation from the network the files will be locked on the datastore and the VM will not be able to be restarted.

    An except from Duncan’s blog on Design is below as well that may help you make your decision.

    Basic design principle 1: Isolation response should be chosen based on the version of ESX used. For pre-vSphere 4 Update 2 environment with iSCSI/NFS Storage I recommend to set the isolation response to “Power off” to avoid a possible split brain scenario. I also recommend to have a secondary service console running on the same vSwitch as the iSCSI network to detect an iSCSI outage and avoid false positives.

    Basic design principle 2: Base your isolation response on your SLA. If your SLA dictates that hosts with degraded hardware should not be used, make sure to select shutdown or power off.

    Please see the following links for more detailed information on HA and Isolation Response

    I would also highly recommend picking up Duncan’s books on HA/DRS for both vSphere 4/5 if you haven’t already.


  • PowerShell and Cisco UCS – Even better together

    The Cisco UCS platform can be automated and managed with PowerShell. The GUI is very flexible but like most GUI’s is very manual. As your environment grows and expands so does your workload so automation becomes even more important. Cisco UCS is now over two years old and I have used this platform since very early in its existence. I was excited to see PowerShell support for UCS. I have included some links and basic information here that can help get you started.

    The Cisco Blog is a great place to start with automating your UCS environment

    The initial release of the UCSM toolkit included over 75 cmdlets, including support for comman tasks in UCSM.

    • Stateful connection management to multiple UCSM systems
    • Service Profile Management (create/modify/delete/association)
    • Log viewing/management
    • Server Power Management
    • Full Inventory Management
    • Raw XML input/output capability

    It also includes standard PowerShell functionality:

    • Fully object based architecture
    • Command pipelining support
    • Standard inline help support (get-help syntax)
    • Standardized PowerShell verb usage

    PowerShell is a great way to manage and automate and even report from various platforms including UCS.

    Links:
    UCSM PowerShell Toolkit Download
    http://developer.cisco.com/web/unifiedcomputing/pshell-download

    Automating Cisco UCS with Windows Powershell 101
    http://blogs.cisco.com/datacenter/automating-cisco-ucs-management-with-windows-powershell/


  • Automation (continued) AutoIT

    In continuation of my PowerCLI post regarding automation. I have decided to blog about another tool in my tool belt, AutoIt. AutoIt is a freeware BASIC like scripting language designed for automating the Windows GUI and general scripting. I have used AutoIt to automate installs to thousands of machines when the vendor told me that we would have to manually click through the install on every system, an example would be things that do not have command line or silent switches etc.

    It uses a combination of simulated keystrokes, mouse movement and window/control manipulation in order to automate tasks in a way not possible or reliable with other languages (e.g. VBScript and SendKeys). AutoIt is also very small, self-contained and will run on all versions of Windows out-of-the-box with no annoying “runtimes” required!
    AutoIt was initially designed for PC “roll out” situations to reliably automate and configure thousands of PCs. Over time it has become a powerful language that supports complex expressions, user functions, loops and everything else that veteran scripters would expect.

    Features:

    • Easy to learn BASIC-like syntax
    • Simulate keystrokes and mouse movements
    • Manipulate windows and processes
    • Interact with all standard windows controls
    • Scripts can be compiled into standalone executables
    • Create Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs)
    • COM support
    • Regular expressions
    • Directly call external DLL and Windows API functions
    • Scriptable RunAs functions
    • Detailed helpfile and large community-based support forums
    • Compatible with Windows 2000 / XP / 2003 / Vista / 2008 / Windows 7 / 2008 R2
    • Unicode and x64 support
    • Digitally signed for peace of mind
    • Works with Windows Vista’s User Account Control (UAC)

    Links:

    I highly recommend the tutorial section in the Online Documentation and the forums are a good resource as well. This program is free and great for automation, they do accept donations and that is a great way to support open source projects.

    Soon I will post about VMware orchestrator…


  • PowerCLI – A great tool for VMware management and reporting

    PowerCLI is a powerful tool in your tool belt to manage and report on your VMware environment. It is a set of snap-ins based upon Windows PowerShell that provides administration and automation for VMware vSphere. vSphere PowerCLI ships with over 200 commandlets (pre-built commands) to help administrators manage vSphere.

    This post will summarize many of the resources and links that you can use to get started using PowerCLI and get up to speed quickly.

    This website is the official community and getting started page that will help you get off your feet with PowerCLI
    Getting started with PowerCLI – PowerCLI community – great resource
    http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-13700

    Another great resource to get started.
    PowerCLI 101 slide deck from VMworld 2011 as posted by Professional VMware
    http://www.slideshare.net/ProfessionalVMware/vmworld-2011-powercli-101

    Blog Resources, below are links to several prominent PowerCLI / VMware community members, I recommending looking here first if you need a script. The community site linked above is a great resource for scripts as well.

    One of the first scripts that I would work on using in any environment would be the vCheck script by Alan Renouf, use it, automate it and improve your environment with it.

    If you prefer to use a GUI for managing and working with code such as PowerCLI, Quest has you covered here as well with PowerGUI. PowerGUI goes well beyond just using it for VMware as they have Exchange, AD and other community packs for using PowerShell.

    You can find the community PowerPack on Alan Renouf’s site. The VMware Community PowerPack is a community driven project which enables us as VMware admins to share our day to day problems and fixes through the format of scripts with a nice GUI front end making it even easier for us all to help each other out as at the end of the day we are all managing the same systems and probably hitting some of the same issues or requests for information.
    The PowerPack contains a variety of scripts from Virtu-al.net and now other blogs such as ict-freak.nl, van-lieshout.com and ntpro.nl transformed and enhanced into a useful PowerPack for PowerGUI.

    Finally there are several great books (which are on my book shelf) for PowerCLI / Powershell for VMware.

    In summary PowerCLI is a very powerful tool that I have used time and time again to manage and report on the VMware environment. When I show people the power and versatility that it provides sometimes even with just a few lines, they are amazed at how simple the benefits can be obtained.