Early this morning I received the mail that I have been selected as a VMware vExpert for 2011 .
I have to be honest I really wasn’t sure if I would make it or not as the amount of top people who contribute to the VMware community as a whole is insane to say the least. But I’m overwhelmingly honoured that I’ve been selected and cannot wait to be a part of such an awesome group of my peers. For those of you who don’t know what the vExpert award is, here is the definition from the vExpert site:
The VMware vExpert Award is given to 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.
A massive thanks to the people that recommended me and to John Troyer and his team/panel for selecting me . Also a massive congratulations to all the other people selected especially all the ones from the London VMUG. Also you can see the list of the other vExpert awardees on Arnim van Lieshout’s vExpert page
There has been a very large amount of top news and product releases in the virtualisation community in the last month since my last All Things Virtual posting. The public voting for the VMworld sessions has opened and closed in the last month and the entries for vExpert have closed with the nominees due to be released in next two weeks ( Good luck to all who submitted and hopefully loads of the people I’m friendly with in the VMware community and London VMware User Group are selected).
I was able to attend the latest London VMware User Group this past month and blogged about the day and the things covered in my blog posting aptly named London VMUG . As I’ve said before if you aren’t a part of your local VMware User Group I would highly recommend it and if there isn’t one near you why not start one yourself
Next is the release of VMware labs latest fling ,Inventory Snapshot. Due to my lack of having time to fully play around and try the tool I would recommend (like I will be when I have some spare time) to go to the fling site ,download the tool and rate it for yourself http://labs.vmware.com/flings/inventorysnapshot .The guide for the product is here.
EMC World ran from the 9th to the 12th of May and just like VMworld there was a load of vLabs available to attendees to allow them to learn and experience new products and technologies . A number of the top guys in the VMware community who are EMC vSpecialists were a part of the planning,building and managing of this environment.Chris Horn has guest posted on Chad Sakac’s blog all about it and has given a great insight into building such a large environment and the technologies they used. Well worth the read if you have some spare time.
One of the many people who helped with the EMC World labs was Simon Seagrave of TechHead fame and as mentioned in Chris’ blog posting Simon somehow found the time to do the latest instalment of the vChat series with David Davis of Trainsignal’s VMware vSphere Video Training fame and Eric Siebert of vSphere-Land fame. The chat covers everything from VMworld submissions,the latest virtualisation news and bits about EMC world. If you haven’t watched any of these vChat’s before I would highly recommend them as the guys cover all the latest and greatest things coming out.
If you enjoy the vChat’s then I would recommend Mike Lavericks Chinwag’s video’s (the latest with guest Duncan Epping of Yellow-Bricks.com fame (@DuncanYB) which I found very interesting for the Ephemeral Port Groups & vCloud Director parts) and the vSoup podcasts by Chris Dearden of JFVI fame, Christian Mohn of vninja.net fame and Ed Czerwin(@eczerwin) who guest blogs on vninja.net fame. The vSoups are always entertaining and all three of the guys are amazingly passionate about the technologies and from personal experience really great guys also.
Speaking of Simon Seagrave and David Davis, Simon has launched a competition on his blog to win one of David’s Trainsignal videos. I’ve already got the videos myself but if you haven’t got them as yet why not apply as you’ll stand a very good chance of winning as remarkably not many people actually apply for great competitions like this.
I mentioned in my last All Things Virtual the release of the VMware View App for iPad . Jason Boche has very kindly opened up a test environment for people to connect to and trial the software and app through. I’ve not yet had a chance to try his offering myself but for anyone who doesn’t have access to a VMware View environment this will be a great learning and demo tool. Jason has also co-written with Dawn Theirl (@KokopeIIi) a great posting all about the usage of Cisco Discovery Protocol in your VMware environment and goes into great depth of how it works. This posting has been extremely helpful in my understanding of the technology for my VCAP studies. Really worth a read for anyone using or thinking of using the feature with their Cisco switches.
Last year at VMworld US and Europe David Davis and Kendrick Coleman did a session titled Top 10 Free Tools for vSphere Management. I was able to attend the session at VMworld Europe and it was a real eye opener to all the software available for free that can make your daily job so much easier. Kendrick has now updated his list with new tools and software in preparation for David and himself doing the session again at this years VMworld conferences if they are selected. If you haven’t seen this list, this will save you so much time trying to find the tools you need without having to beg for financial approval
Lately my studying for the sitting of the VCAP-DCA exam has intensified and part of one of the main objectives is HA and DRS. Both Vladan Seget and Alan Renouf have done two great postings on these technologies recently. Alan has created an HA and DRS audit script which checks that your VMware environment meets best practices as laid out in Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman’s HA and DRS book . Vladan has posted about HA Slot Sizes and how they are calculated. This posting really helped me better understand HA and how the slot sizes impact how your HA reacts and reports. As mentioned in Vladan’s posting Duncan Epping has done a brilliant HA Deepdive posting which I would recommend reading first before reading Vladan’s posting
Last but not least is a warning to all VMware Administrators to make sure you read what is on your screen when you are doing certain tasks and if you aren’t sure of what your doing rather research it before doing something that may cause you to lose your job. Chris Dearden alerted a number of people on twitter to the VMware communities posting and blogged about the need to read the install screens as this poor guy obviously didn’t.
Well that’s it for another fortnight/month.I hope some of the postings will help people and or those writing their VCAP exams in the coming month good luck.
A very quick posting to alert people who may not have seen it announced on twitter by John Troyer that the 2011 vExpert nominations and applications are now open. The vExpert 2011 is based on the amount you gave back to the VMware community in 2010. So if you have done really well this year but didn’t do much last year then you will only be able to add that to next year’s application obviously.
The vExpert, for anyone that doesn’t know it is “a way for VMware to acknowledge and help those who ‘go the extra mile’ and give back to the VMware user community by sharing their expertise and time. vExperts are bloggers, book authors, VMUG leaders, event organizers, speakers, tool builders, forum leaders, and others who share their virtualization expertise.” Unlike last year VMware now want everyone to put in an application for themselves so that VMware can get a good idea of your participation in the community and the things you have contributed to it in 2010. There is also the nomination forms like normal where you nominate people who you feel deserve to be a vExpert.
So go apply if you feel you deserve to be in contention to be a vExpert and good luck to everyone applying.
The whole community has been buzzing with the news of the vExpert’s for 2010. As I said in the last all things virtual I didn’t think I was going to become one and I wasn’t surprised when I didn’t become one. I wrote a blog posting about the reasons I feel I didn’t get it and how I think if I keep trying hopefully I will be selected as one. One encouraging part from this past week was a twitter message from John Troyer the leader/owner of the vExpert community saying he thinks I’m off to a great start on my way to becoming one. Thanks John it really means a lot to me 🙂
Scott Lowe whose book Mastering VMware vSphere 4 was a massive help for my in my preparation for my VCP4 posted a very thought provoking posting all about blogging for the right reasons. This isn’t virtualisation per se but it does relate well to people blogging just for the sake of possibly becoming a vExpert or for getting a new job/role. Speaking of Scott’s book his book is now available as an Ebook.
Arnim van Lieshout posted all about the latest release of the vEcoShell and the new features it has. The vEcoShell is a brilliant tool and is one I’m trying to strengthen my knowledge on due to the great customisations you can do with it and the power it has for running scripts via PowerCli in your virtual environment.
VMware have also released the latest version of the VCP on vSphere 4 Exam Blueprint Guide. These blueprints are amazing and are the best way I feel in making sure you know and have the required knowledge and skills to pass the VCP4 exam.
VMware have also announced that there is now support for VMware SDK’s via the support team tasked with this support. Mike DiPetrillo has written a blog posting all about this release and what it means for people like himself helping people prepare their applications and services for the cloud.
Rick Scherer has posted a blog posting all about EMC’s new technology EMC VPLEX. This was released at EMC world and allows the infamous long distance vmotion. I won’t try describe it capabilities as Rick has explained it great in his posting and the video from EMC world in which Nick Weaver (@lynxbat) had a major role in setting up and making sure it ran smoothly. The video is below
Jason Boche has posted up how to win yourself a free pass to this years VMworld.I’m sure a staggering amount of people are going to be entering as most companies are still weary of spending money on these kinds of conventions so this is a great way for someone to make it. I’ve been given the nod to make it to this years one which I’m extremely excited about and hopefully I can generate some really good blog postings while there like the ones I read so much for last years one.
While catching up on my VMware Communities Roundtable podcasts I was listening to the podcast from a few weeks back about the VCAP exams and was very pleased to hear that live labs are going to be a large part of the exams to stem the tide of people using “braindump” materials.
Colin Steele was the first person I saw to have posted a blog on an error is saw pour in at the VMware communities about a Microsoft patch that was preventing vSphere client logins. VMware have also created an official knowledgebase article on the problem and how to fix it.
Lastly a friend of mine who also works in virtualisation Kivian Johnson of First Rand Bank alerted me to a very helpful and possibly integral free tool by Foundstone a division of McAfee’s VIDigger. The tool is “designed to help administrators check the configuration of ESX server and the virtual machines hosted on ESX server against the VMware Infrastructure Hardening guide and other best practices.” I am yet to fully try it out in my lab environment but if it really does do all the things they say it will be a brilliant tool for any virtual infrastructure administrator.
Firstly a massive congratulations to all who were bestowed with this accolade. In particular a massive congratulations to Barry Coombs (@VirtualisedReal) ,Gabrie van Zanten (@gabvirtualworld) ,Alan Renouf (@alanrenouf) ,Tom Howarth (@tom_howarth) ,Nick Weaver (@lynxbat) ,Eric Sloof (@esloof) and Simon Long (@SimonLong_). Who have always been more than happy to answer any questions I have had via twitter, mail or even as recent as last night willing to power up their laptop to help with a problem we were having (Thanks again Gabrie, you’re a legend)
As I said in my last posting I didn’t have a massive amount of confidence in my being selected as a vExpert. This due to what I feel are very fair and understandable reasons and how I feel my continued efforts will hopefully help me have a much stronger case for next years. John Troyer who is the leader of the vExpert community has posted a brilliant article on the reasons some people didn’t receive it and has also given some really great pointers on how to better yourself for next years. Off of this here is some of the reasons I feel I understandably missed out and why I think I’m on the right track for next years:
I only started this blog at the end of November last year so due to the award being given for the activities you did in 2009 means I did extremely little and therefore rightly so was no where near being in contention. Since then though I have made a concerted effort to post more and try bring new ideas to the community. With this blog having had almost 3000 individual views so far , 2435 of that being between January to May this year and by the views increasing by at least 200 views every month it gives me hope that I’ll be a much stronger contender for next years if I keep it up.
I only started interacting with the virtualisation community late last year via twitter and was only able to attend my first VMUG end of November last year so I still need to make a name for myself and surpassing 300 followers on twitter last week of which over 98% are technical people gives me confidence that I am building a good reputation for myself among my peers and that the opinions and information I post is of interest to people in the IT field.
I need to strengthen my blog postings. I’m the first to admit that my blog postings aren’t the best for a few reasons but after having read through my postings even from a few months back I can see that with each posting I feel I’ve become a lot better at it and have learnt from each one.The increased readership I feel is partly due to this refining of my skills.
Plain and simple I’m either too busy or just lazy some times and due to this I haven’t been able to give back as much to the VMware communities pages and been able to join the live roundtables as much as I would like to. I plan to change this and hopefully via this be inspired to write more postings ,as one of the reasons I only post every week or so is due to the lack of good material/ideas and therefore I would rather not post up anything rather than some drivel for the sake of posting.
My lack of knowledge on the many things VMware does and the technologies that are available and how they work. I only became a VCP in VI3 in September last year due to only being able to attend the pre-requisite course a few weeks before and since then I have also obtained the VCP4 accreditation within a month of it becoming available late last year and with a very nice score if i do say so myself. With this ,my knowledge on all the subjects is increasing each day and thereby my blogs can be more knowledgeable and I will have the confidence in my knowledge to write up more postings on certain subjects as the worry of any blogger is that your information is wrong and you have made a fool of yourself by giving out the wrong facts.
So if you enjoyed any of my blog postings please link the information to your friends and colleagues and even better if you link to my blog postings via your own blogs if they have helped you this is obviously a brilliant way of getting more traffic to my site and more so bringing my solutions higher in search results so that more people can be helped by them.
Congratulations to all the vExperts again and hopefully I’ll be one of you next year.
I’m fairly pleased that these summaries of the things that have caught my interest in virtualisation have been getting so much traffic and even more pleased is that even though I didn’t post anything massive in particular I got my highest number of viewers last month to this blog with a week still to go which is always encouraging as hopefully some of the stuff I write about helps someone like so many of the websites I read have helped me.
First is the imminent announcement of the vExperts for 2010. I would obviously be extremely honoured if I became one but I think I’d be in shock a lot more though as there are some really top people in the field.
Next is a posting by Gabrie van Zanten (@gabvirtualworld) all about the default installation settings he does when setting up a vSphere 4 host. Some of the tips he mentions are ones I never thought about or knew so I’ll definitely be referencing his posting as well as Duncan Epping’s response to Gabrie’s posting all about his best practices/recommendations. I always enjoy finding these kinds of postings as sometimes these kinds of things you only learn having done many high level environment deployments etc and are also great tips for thoughts for my builds for my future VCDX attempt.
Duncan has also done a two part blog posting with Frank Denneman all about swapping in your VMware environment and what metrics actually show performance degradation and how they are worked out. Franks posting gives more of a description on how the memory is calculated and describes the reasons for swapping happening in your environment and how to try avoid it happening and thereby impacting your servers performance.
A few people have blogged about this but the first i saw it was on Virtualization spotlight a blog by Patrick Redknap. VMware have published a video KB on how to power off an unresponsive VMware ESX virtual machine. This video is a really useful one as quite a number of times I’ve battled to get a vm to shutdown correctly even after having tried rebooting services it stayed hung.
Frank Denneman has also posted a really good posting all about setting up memory reservations in your resource pools and how they work. This posting ties in really well on the little known (at least to me and a number of people I have spoken to /asked about memory reservations) about how a vm’s reservations will hoard memory if it has been used by the virtual machine once. Frank describes it well in the part “Even if the virtual machine becomes idle, the VMkernel will not reclaim this memory and return it to the free memory set. This means that ESX can start swapping and ballooning if no free memory is available for other virtual machines while the owning VM’s aren’t using their claimed reserved memory.” Recently while doing some testing for the HA setup in my environment I noticed from a vCheck report I ran that HA stated there were no spare slots in my HA cluster, so I did some research and came across Duncan Epping’s Slot sizes posting and onto his HA deepdive posting in which he describes how the slots are worked out :
“To calculate available resources and needed resources for a fail-over HA uses a concept called “slots”. Slots dictate how many VMs can be started up before vCenter starts yelling “Out Of Resources”!! Normally each slot represents one VM.
A slot is a logical representation of the memory and CPU resources that satisfy the requirements for any powered-on virtual machine in the cluster.
In other words a slot size is the worst case CPU and Memory reservation scenario in a cluster. This directly leads to the first “gotcha”:
HA uses the highest CPU reservation of any given VM and the highest memory reservation of any given VM. If no reservations of higher than 256Mhz are set HA will use a default of 256Mhz for CPU and a default of 0MB+memory overhead for memory.
If VM1 has 2GHZ and 1024GB reserved and VM2 has 1GHZ and 2048GB reserved the slot size for memory will be 2048MB+memory overhead and the slot size for CPU will be 2GHZ. “
So I went through all of my vm’s and found a few stragglers that had memory reservations that had been switched off for a while. Once i cleared these our empty slots went from zero to 85 due to two of the switched off machines having six gb’s of ram reservations. Eric Sloof has also recently posted a great posting all about adding resource pools and how these can impact the performance of your vm’s even if you think they aren’t.
Speaking of VMware clustering options Cody Bunch has done a brilliant posting in the math behind the DRS stars. The math is a bit over my hear personally but math always has been so nothing new there. It’s very interesting how they work all these things out and a great bit of information for your setting up your DRS cluster.
Whilst i was doing my HA testing i had a few questions of how HA works and due to our environment being a test lab it’s also an integral part of our work as a consultancy so I couldn’t test what happened for the differing options you can select for HA. So I asked on twitter and Kendrick Coleman (@kendrickcoleman) not only replied to me among other people but went and tested it out for me in his test lab and posted a very nice blog posting all about it. Glad I gave him an idea and thanks for the results Kendrick!! It’s much appreciated and is one of the reasons being on twitter is priceless if you work in IT.
If you want to comment about my blog either leave me a comment and I’ll make sure I respond to you or add my on twitter via @greggrobertson5. Also congrats to the imminently crowned vExpert’s for 2010.
It’s been a very busy but also a very rewarding productive few weeks for me. Even though it came down to a relatively simple solution the working of my VMware Update Manager was a massive weight off my shoulders and a lot of lessons learnt from it which is always something valuable.
On the virtualisation news side it’s been a very interesting couple of weeks with some brilliantly written blogs and articles.
Vladan Seget (@vladan) did a very good posting on setting a static MAC address in VMware. This is something you learn when you’re studying for your VCP but is something that personally I’ve forgotten really easily but is a very helpful feature especially if you have a vm with software on it that requires a licence to be attached to the vm’s MAC address but you still want to be able to migrate the vm around for either HA or DRS capabilities.
Next is the VMware Support Toolbar by Rick Blythe (@rickblythe) aka VMwareWolf. The toolbar is a very clever idea and the only reason I’ve linked Vladan’s posting on it is that he details all the features it has and how to set it up etc and seeing as Rick linked to it at the top of his posting about the toolbar it seems he’s happy with the posting being used for his toolbar. I’ve only partly played around with the toolbar but it’s a great example of how professionals are thinking of new ways for a VMware administrator to be able to keep up to date and easily search for VMware knowledge base items.
Cody Bunch (@cody_bunch) of http://professionalvmware.com has been doing some really great VCDX brown bag sessions on all the things you should know for you VCDX and obviously as the name alludes to they are discussions amongst fellow professionals about the topics you will need to know to do your defence. A “study group” is another way of describing it. Cody was nice enough to reply to me on twitter when I enquired about the ability to watch/listen to the previous brown bag sessions and I was pleased to find out they have been recorded and the second brown bag session is already up. I’ve always found discussions amongst fellow professionals about a common technology highly beneficial as sometimes i really need someone to explain something in laymen’s terms to me for me to understand it. I’d recommend registering for the next one and to keep an eye out for the future sessions. He’s also done a few VCP brown bag sessions and theses have also been recorded so if you’re looking to write your VCP soon or even like me keep your knowledge fresh then these are perfect for this.
Duncan Epping of Yellow Bricks fame did a very informative posting all about aligning your VMs virtual hard disks. I spoke partly of this in one of my blog postings a few weeks back and Duncan has added some great information to this discussion and is one i learnt quite a few things from so is well worth the read. Duncan also did a very helpful posting on where to find pre-windows 2008 sysprep packages for those who are battling to find them.
Eric Sloof (@esloof) posted two great articles these past few weeks. The first one was a very interesting interview with one of the attendee’s of his VMware vSphere Design Workshop course and his opinions of how the course went and how good it was. After watching it it’s made me even more keen to attend the course and gain the knowledge they you can gain from it especially from fellow VMware professionals. The other is his announcing of the upcoming vSphere 4 Automation course. It shows the growing need and trend of VMware professionals to have the knowledge and ability to automate some of the tasks performed in their VMware environment as well as a great course for gaining the knowledge you will require for managing your environment in ESXi.
Talking of ESXi and the push by VMware for people to migrate from ESX to ESXi, Eric Siebert (@ericsiebert) of http://vmware-land.com/ posted a very very good blog posting all about how VMware’s desire for people to adopt ESXi isn’t going as well as they may have hoped and how VMware are going to need to fix a number of issues that ESXi has that ESX doesn’t before the change over and how their motivators for the switch aren’t as strong as they make out. The article is brilliant and is especially so to me as I agree wholeheartedly with many of the points in it and myself don’t see nor agree with the whole idea of them moving over to ESXi and scrapping ESX.
There has always been the discussion of scale up versus scale out when you are creating a Virtual environment and over the past few weeks there have been a few great postings from some of the top virtualisations bloggers about this discussion. It seems the whole thing kicked off from a blog posting Duncan Epping did about scaling up due to the release of the new Intel 5600 series that has six cores. Which set off a blog posting by Ian Koenig at http://itsjustanotherlayer.com/ titled scale up or scale out in which he brings up some brilliant check points every VMware administrator should ask when determining whether to scale up or scale out. Scott Lowe then commented on Ian’s posting in his Virtualization Short Take #37 and gave his opinion on the discussion which in turn made Steve Chambers (@Stevie_chambers) write an article about how he feels UCS is the solution to the worry about having “all your eggs in one basket”. His blog posting is also very informative about the features UCS has and how it allows you to have all your machines on one big server. This in turn brought Scott to write a posting describing his opinions in full and how he feels as is always said for anything in IT “it depends” on a number of factors and one model or decision is never the same for every company/environment/situation. Lastly a great blog posting by a twitter friend of mine and top VMware professional Daniel Eason(@Daniel_Eason) about High Density Virtual Hosts gives a great insight into more of the factors you need to consider when building a “Super ESX Host(my own words)”. All of these articles are brilliantly informative and as with any great article they encourage discussion. You make your own decisions and I encourage you to read all the comments below each of the articles as these are as good if not maybe a little bit better than the articles.
This past week the applications for the VMware vExpert award have been opened. The vExpert for anyone that doesn’t know it is “a way for VMware to acknowledge and help those who ‘go the extra mile’ and give back to the VMware user community by sharing their expertise and time. vExperts are bloggers, book authors, VMUG leaders, event organizers, speakers, tool builders, forum leaders, and others who share their virtualization expertise.” As you can imagine there has been a very large amount of chat in twitterverse about the applications and who may be honoured by the awarding of it. Personally I’d love to become one and hope that with my continued efforts to give back to the community and grow my contributions to the field I’ll one day soon be awarded the title. If you know of anyone that deserves this award then get an application in for them. But be warned that multiple nominations don’t count extra so applying for yourself 100 times and asking loads of people to apply for you won’t help you to win this.
In my Distributed Virtual Switches blog posting i detailed the process of upgrading your virtual machines hardware version to version 7 but Sander Daems (@sanderdaems) posted a very helpful posting on how to downgrade your vm hardware level from 7 to 4 if it is needed to fix an issue you may be having. It always makes me smile when a blog posting like this is posted as I’m always so focused on the newest things and the latest versions of software that i forget that sometimes the need for rolling back to an older possibly more stable version is the option.
Even though this next posting is old it’s one I feel is very important and useful in the growth of anyone’s scripting knowledge. Alan Renouf created a very helpful Quick Reference Guide for the VI toolkit which you can print off and obviously reference whenever you need it.
VMware have recently posted a new white paper detailing performance results of tests conducted of a vSphere 4.0 environment using Microsoft SQL Server 2008. The white paper can be downloaded here.
Rich Brambley (@rbrambley) posted all about the reasoning and some fixes/solutions you can make as to why cloning a vm from a template can take such a long time. Rick’s posting has some great links for IOPS and gives some very in depth solutions and reasons as to why the problem might happen. The posting is very helpful and sheds light on points some people may miss in their aim of making their virtual environment run as quickly and smoothly as possible.
Arnim van Lieshout (@avlieshout) did a great blog posting about how to setup and get running The VESI (Virtualization EcoShell Initiative). If you’ve never heard of The VESI before then i would recommend reading the FAQ before reading and then implementing the solution into your environment. Arnim has detailed every step and installation needed in getting it working and is a massive help for someone trying to get it setup.
Last by definitely not least was a posting by Devang Panchigar (@storagenerve) with the video of the VBlocks presentation at the GestaltIT Tech Field Day 2010 in Boston Massachusetts this past week. The presentation was highly informative and a great insight into the solution and is well worth the watch.
As I’ve said before I’m always happy for people to leave a comment below or add me on twitter at @greggrobertson5. If you feel I’ve missed something or not given credit or wrongly described yours or someone else’s posting as this is the last thing i mean to do, please tell me an I’ll change it.
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TheSaffaGeek 