TheSaffaGeek

My ramblings about all things technical

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All Things VMworld US 2011 Day 3

 

Well that’s VMworld coming to an end. It seems to have gone by so quickly but it also means that now we can start talking about VMworld in Copenhagen and I don’t have to keep hearing about the killers playing the VMworld closing party (I’m not jealous at all Winking smile ) . Day 3 is normally the day where everyone hits the solutions exchange, the sessions and the hands on labs. For me day 3 is great for all the videos that are put out as now they can show us all the new products and announcements mentioned in the keynote by Steve Herrod on VMworldTV and even an interviews with Steve himself detailing all the announcements he made.

  • First is the preview of Horizon mobile by Samsung and LG who are the two mobile phone providers working with VMware to bring out Horizon Mobile
Horizon Mobile
  • The next video is done by @the_anykey and is the interview with VMware CTO Steve Herrod. This is a must watch as it gives you a brilliant idea of the announcements he made and what they will mean for peoples daily lives (Horizon mobile for one)
Steve Herrod
  • Next is the VMworldTV video all about Project Octopus. As I said in my Day 2 posting I think this is the best announcement so far and will be changing a lot of peoples way of working in the near future.
Project Octopus
  • Next is an interview with Scott Davis, VMware’s CTO of end user computing and is all about AppBlast with a really awesome demo of it too! I’m really looking forward to this technology being released.
AppBlast
  • The next has to be my favourite, probably because of the highly amusing appearance of “PowerCLI man” and my knowing of Alan due to him being a fellow London VMUG attendee and former EMC vSpecialist. Alan gives a great overview of all the new features in PowerCLI 5 and even mentions one of my firm favourites the vCheck script. Also as said there’s even an appearance by PowerCLI man Smile
PowerCLI
  • Another twitter and Fellow vExpert friend of mine Kendrick Coleman was also interviewed by VMworldTV all about the free tools available out there for people to use. Kendrick and David M Davis of Trainsignal fame are doing their Top 10 free tools sessions again and from this Kendrick mentions a few of them in the video and even mentions a few that have been developed by people all by themselves like Ricky El Qasem’s vSphere Plugin Wizard which is mentioned by Kendrick. It’s very sad to hear that the session Kendrick and David have done in VMworld Us has been cut from VMworld Europe. Hopefully they get one of the slots for most popular session again
Kendrick Coleman Free Tools
  • Last but not least is the Day summaries of the Past three days at VMworld. As mentioned in my Day 2 posting these are a great way to find out what’s been announced and is happening if you don’t have a lot of time to read up on what’s come out.

Day 1

Day 2

Day 3

Well that’s everything for Day 3 of VMworld US 2011.

Gregg


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All Things VMworld US 2011 Day 2

 

Wow day 2 of VMworld really stepped it up and the keynote announcements did not disappoint at all. Some amazing announcements during the keynote by VMware CTO Steve Herrod and even a really classic line by Vittorio (Product Manager for EUC at VMware) stating a yellow Ferrari he supposedly hit as part of one of the demo’s isn’t a real Ferrari due to it being yellow. So here are all the things that caught my eye from the news of VMworld day 2:

  • The main news of the whole day in my opinion has to be from the keynote by VMware CTO Steve Herrod. Due to it being in the morning unlike Paul Maritz’s the day before I was able to watch the keynote streaming and personally (possibly because new technology keeps my attention a million times more) a lot more interesting. If you haven’t watched the keynote, you can still see it and Paul’s by registering here. I’m not going to give a minute by minute detail of the keynote but in my opinion the big announcements of the keynote were:
    • The announcement of VMware View 5. Steve did a demonstration of View 5 in his keynote where he provisioned a pool of virtual desktops using a “technology called linked clones” as he said. It did look quite good but wasn’t very much of an in-depth demo in my opinion and gave more of a look of it rather than what it can do. Vladan Seget has done a great blog posting all about the announcement of VMware View 5 and has given some great details all about it if you are interested here. Some of the new features do look amazing and I’m really looking forward to seeing more about it in the coming weeks. The VMware View team also did a very light hearted video of a Rock Parody here
    • Next was the demo of Project ThinApp Factory (love how they refuse to call it an app store clip_image001). This demo was much more interesting and is very exciting, as it will be using ThinApp and Horizon to extract your applications from your windows systems and move them into an application portal where you can provision the applications to your users. This also enables you to access these applications via your mobile device with the Horizon Application Manager and Horizon mobile. LG and Samsung are already working with VMware to enable horizon mobile on their devices and supposedly a load more are due in the future.
    • Steve then mentioned what i think was the announcement of the keynote and it was Project Octopus. Where you can offer a corporate DropBox style repository to your users and your clients. It will supposedly be available via the public and private cloud and will have a load of security enhancements and features to keep your companies security team happy in the knowledge that only the correct people will be able to access the applications. You can sign up now for news and the beta of project Octopus here.
    • Vittorio (Product Manager for EUC at VMware) then took to the stage and gave a great users perspective of all these new announcements as well as Project AppBlast which converts your traditional desktop applications into HTML5 to allow you run them on any HTML compliant device. I would highly recommend watching the keynote for this part as it’s great to see how it all works and looks and also the breakdown of it all by Steve afterwards gives you a really good idea of how it’s all done. VMware’s description of the technology is:
      • “Project AppBlast will provide the universal delivery of any application, including Windows-based applications, to any device supporting HTML5, enabling instant remote access to applications without the heavy footprint of the underlying operating system. Project Octopus will leverage data sync technology from VMware Zimbra™ and Mozy™to enable enterprise-grade collaboration and information/data sharing. Additionally, Project Octopus will offer easy integration with VMware Horizon, VMware View and Project AppBlast to create a secure enterprise cloud service. These two projects promise to dramatically simplify the access and sharing of information across people and mobile devices, contributing to the Connected Enterprise.”
    • Next Steve showed off the new vSphere iPad Client and how you can now vMotion virtual machines from the client. Personally no matter what people may try to say to convince me otherwise i do think that doing these kinds of tasks via your iPad is more of a gimmick than a very useful day-to-day tool. However, I guess if the masses want to try using their iPad to do their daily work then this is obviously going to be a very popular announcement for some. As a number of people on twitter were saying it does lend itself to “oops sorry boss my kid just migrated the oracle DB server by mistake via my iPad’s vSphere client”
    • VMware Go was then shown and covered. The offering will allow SMB’s to use a web based tool to scan their environment and allow them to work out what machines can be virtualised and give them a “for dummies” admin portal to do this all in. Also as part of this drive to help the SMB market Steve mentions the VSA that was released with vSphere5 and how it will allow users to utilise three hosts local storage to create a virtual storage array for their usage. You can read up more about the VSA here
    • There is more talk about new features that were released with vSphere5 from auto deploy to the “monster VM” capabilities that vSphere5 has now enabled. I’m not going to really cover these as there’s loads of resources out there about the new features due to it being released last week before VMworld.
    • One part of the new features that was very interesting though was the announcement of the VXLAN which will allow encapsulation of L2packets into L3 packets and will supposedly remedy the identifier=location problems. I have to be honest I’m not very much of a networking guru and so this is something I’m going to need to read up more on before i can fully understand it’s capabilities. VMware have however submitted the specification to the IETF here for those who are more networking based and might understand it a lot better than what I do.
    • Steve then announces SRM 5 and its new capability of automated Failback and uses the recent hurricane Irene in the US as a great example of the benefits of having a technology like this. You can read more about SRM 5 here. I’m not going to attempt to cover it, as there’s a fair amount of features that come with it and it’s easier to go through the datasheet of it than my repeating what is already covered in there.
    • Lastly, Steve goes into vShield 5 and the changes and enhancements that are now available with the new release. The biggest part for my out of this is the news that vShield App will now incorporate DLP technologies (via RSA) to enable additional protection.

Well that’s all the big news out of VMworld that caught my interest.

Gregg


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All Things VMworld US 2011 Day 1

 

Yep seeing as loads of people seemed to like my postings from last year I thought I would do it again and it should also help me to list all the news I need to read up on seeing as my twitter feed for VMworld is going crazy and is going to be a nightmare to keep up with. So here is all the news from day 1 of VMworld US 2011 that I want to read when I have a chance and caught my eye:

  • First has to be a number of postings covered by Vladan Seget of Vladan.fr fame as he has already posted some great postings about announcements happening at VMworld. His first is all about the announcement by vKernel of their new version of their flagship product vOps- vKernel Operations Suite. Vladan has detailed all the new features in his blog posting so have a read through it as it looks to be an amazing product. Second is his covering of the announcement that David M Davis and  Elias Khnaser have now released their VMware vSphere 5 Trainsignal videos. As I’ve mentioned numerous times and even in my review of one of David videos yesterday I really enjoy these videos and owe a large portion of my passing of my VCP4 to David’s videos. So I cant wait to get my hands on this new set especially seeing as I’m going to need to know it not just for my daily job but also for my eventual upgrading of my VCAP’s to version 5. Talking of vSphere 5 certifications Vladan covered that the registration for the VCP5 exams are now open. I’m hoping that the rumours of being able to achieve the VCP5 automatically by upgrading my VCAP exams are true but as I say those aren’t confirmed as yet.
  • Next is all the great sites and links that can be used to keep up with all the latest news from VMworld US.
    • You can register and watch Paul Maritz’s keynote and Steve Herrods session today here if you possibly miss it like I did Paul’s last night.
    • There is the live stream from VMworld with interviews and news and even a link to the Keynote by Steve Herrod the Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of R&D for VMware from 8am-9:30am Vegas time tomorrow.Plus all the videos from the past few days so make sure you have a look at them all here and make sure you’re watching the keynote.
    • There is also the VMware Community TV booth run by John Troyer and Alex Maier. These ones are my favourite as it covers all types of things from the vExpert daily podcast (where a number of the 2011 VMware vExperts give us their views on the announcements of the day and what they think it might mean to the future of virtualisation) to Mike Laverick’s Chinwags and the vChats by David Davis, Eric Siebert and Simon Seagrave. The schedule for it all and when it is happening can be found here.
    • VMworldTV is also running again on YouTube and already there’s a number of videos up including Day1 Summary of VMworld 2011 in Vegas and the very exciting news that a load of us have all been waiting for that VMworld Hands-on Labs will be going public in 2012 (also it’s great to hear a fellow Saffa Mornay van der Walt ,Senior Director of R&D for VMware describing it all) . I really enjoyed the videos from VMworld TV last year as they covered loads of the great news really quickly allowing me to get a very good high level view of the things happening and then I could further research the things I wanted to know more about.
  • Next is a number of announcements from EMC all about the compatibility of it’s service offerings with VMware vSphere5 and all the new features they are releasing. So as to not explain things incorrectly and to make this posting non biased I’ll let you read the postings by Chad Sakac himself in his EMC and vSphere5 what’s supported when posting as well as his EMC virtual storage integrator version 5 posting. Some really exciting stuff and personally I’m loving the free licence period for PowerPath
  • Some of the top bloggers have given their perspective’s on the first day and even given their opinions on some of the sessions they attended. Duncan Epping of Yellow-bricks.com fame posted all about his VMworld Day 1 experiences and gave some brilliant insight into his session with Frank Denneman (one I’m definitely planning to attend in Copenhagen) as well as other sessions he attended. Scott Lowe also blogged about Duncan and Franks session in his posting  VSP1682: VMware vSphere Clustering Q&A. Scott also did a brilliant posting all about Monday’s General Session. Some amazing facts and figures mentioned in the General Session.
  • Last but not least is something people may miss during all the news coming out of VMworld and that is that the vExpert Spotlight postings are still being published every other day and already there’s been some really great ones with Jane Rimmer’s last Friday and James Bowling’s yesterday. So keep an eye out for them as there really are some great tips and advice from the 2011 VMware vExperts

Gregg


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Trainsignal VMware vSphere Troubleshooting Training videos review

 

As I’ve mentioned in my VCAP4-DCA&DCD Resources Page one of the main resources I’m using is David M Davis’ VMware vSphere 4 VCAP Training Package set of videos. The first of the videos of this set I’ve gone through in my study preparations for the VCAP-DCA exam is his VMware vSphere Troubleshooting Training set of videos.

I was very fortunate to gain access to these videos and I’ve honestly learnt so so much from them as David’s videos not only cover objective 6 of the VCAP-DCA blueprint but due to the nature of troubleshooting your VMware infrastructure meaning you will need to all parts of it David has given great lessons and tips covering everything from storage basics, to VLANs to utilising third party tools to try troubleshoot problems. A perfect example of this overlap is David’s Lesson 20 where he goes into great detail all about VMware storage terms,concepts and logs where he gives a brilliant refresher/lesson all about the PSA architecture to name but one part of it which perfectly links in the VCAP-DCA Objective 1.3 – Configure and Manage Complex Multipathing and PSA Plug-ins.

image_thumb[1]

The lessons have been really great and for most of them David gives some in-depth demo’s of the steps necessary to troubleshoot the problems and what each feature of that troubleshooting entails. This is especially helpful if maybe you don’t have access to your own lab environment where you can try some of the things you need to do to fully understand how it works.

David also gives some great links and resources at the end of each lesson for you to do further reading and links to where he found all the resources he mentions and covers. These have proved extremely helpful as if I’m unsure of something or as is my nature that I want to read it all just to make sure I don’t miss something then i can use his links to quickly gain this knowledge without having to scour the web.

So if you’re studying for the VCAP4-DCA you have to get this course and if possible try get yourself the whole set but as mentioned by numerous VMware trainers, the troubleshooting course is supposedly the most beneficial to the VCAP-DCA exam and David covers it all amazingly. Also even if you aren’t looking to write the VCAP exam the tips and tricks David mentions are unbelievably beneficial to you when you will need to troubleshooting possible problems in your VMware environment.

If you don’t know who David is here a bit of a background:

David Davis -  (VCP4, VCAP-DCA, vExpert, CCIE #9369)

David has been in the IT industry for over 18+ years. He has served as a server/network admin, IT manager, and independent contractor. Today, David is a full-time instructor for TrainSignal.com where he has created over 10 different IT training courses.

Gregg

*Disclaimer: Trainsignal never paid me to write up this review nor did David. I wanted to write up this review due to the high quality of David’s training video’s  and how much it has helped me in my studies and in my daily work administering multiple VMware environments”


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VMware vSphere 5 Released

 

After three days of waiting from the rumoured release date of vSphere 5, VMware have finally released the binaries for the vSphere 5 suite of products. Having been on a few beta’s that incorporated the new vSphere suite of products I’ve been dying to finally get a hold of the GA version so that I could finally start using it. The binaries are available to download now via the VMware download page  as long as you have a valid account to download it with. I’m already downloading all the binaries and really looking forward to trying it all out and utilising all the new features.

image

There are a number of documents that have been released for the suite which should provide a substantial amount of reading for all us who are now looking to implement it and know how it all works. The VMware site has all the documents for vSphere5 here and as Simon Seagrave pointed out in his blog posting there are even kindle formats of them now.Also remember to purchase Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman’s new book vSphere 5 Clustering Technical Deepdive

So get downloading and hopefully I’ll be posting a load more resources on the new suite especially with VMworld US happening next week.

Gregg


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vExpert Spotlight

Just a very quick posting to alert people who may not follow me on twitter that a secret project very close to heart has started being published on the VMware Communities site. It’s been an idea I’ve had for a while and since I was blessed this year by being selected as a vExpert for 2011 it gave me the perfect opportunity to do it.

The first posting http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2011/08/vexpert-spotlight-gregg-robertson.html has just come out and as mentioned in the posting,we are hoping to have as many of the 2011 vExpert’s instalments published as possible. So keep an eye out as some of the top people in the virtualisation industry have already sent me theirs and there’s some really great tips from all involved.

Gregg


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VCAP5-DCA & DCD Resources Page

A very quick posting to alert people that I have now started building up a VCAP5-DCA and DCD Resources page for the impending release of the VCAP5 certifications. At the moment it is fairly short due to the exams not even having reached beta but I’ve got to start somewhere and for those of us out there who will be hoping to be invited to the beta exams these resources will probably be our best preparation Smile 

As said on the page ,if you know of any other resources out there please do leave a comment or drop me a tweet on twitter on @greggrobertson5 as this is really all about helping everyone find the best resources for the exams.

Gregg


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vExpert 2011. Stunned…

Early this morning I received the mail that I have been selected as a VMware vExpert for 2011 Open-mouthed smile.

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 Open-mouthed smile. 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

Gregg


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VCAP-DCA&DCD Resources Page Updated

 

Just a quick posting to alert people that I have just updated my VCAP-DCA & DCD Study Resources page with new resources and great tips.The page is a list of resources that I have been constantly updating as I  have come across new resources and I have made my way through the  required amount of studying to be prepared (which is now in full swing).So either click the “VCAP-DCA & DCD” link at the top of the page or click here if you can’t be bothered going to the top of the page and if you know of any other great resources please do comment so that I can add them and it can benefit the whole community.

Gregg


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All Things Virtual 23

 

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  Smile
  • 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.

Gregg