Yellow Bricks

by Duncan Epping

Management & Automation

VMware Studio 2.0

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There’s a brand new version of VMware Studio coming up. For those who aren’t familiar with VMware Studio it basically comes down to this: with VMware Studio you can create your own virtual appliances.

Or as VMware puts it:

VMware Studio provides mechanisms for authoring, on-site management, distributing and deployment of production-ready virtual appliances. ISVs, hardware appliance vendors, and developers use VMware Studio to configure and package their solutions in a standards-based Open Virtualization Format (OVF). VMware Studio also enables software providers and developers to leverage the industry’s leading virtualization platform, VMware Infrastructure, and offers built appliances all the great management services that VMware Infrastructure delivers.

New features:

  • Windows Support (32 bit and 64 bit) 2003 & 2008 Server
  • Create multi-VM vApp and multi-VM VA
  • 64 bit support for SLES 10.2, RHEL 5.2 & 5.3, CentOS 5.2 & 5.3
  • Extensible in-guest Management Framework
  • OVF 1.0 support
  • Eclipse Plugin
  • Enable ESX, ESXi, VC, Server 2.0 and Workstation as provisioning engine
  • Automatic Dependency Resolution (Static)
  • Publish OVF to VC
  • Infrastructure enhancements – GUI and Builds
  • Studio-created VM as Input

VMware Studio 2.0 will be available on Monday! Better make sure to get it while it’s hot… even vStu is excited!

There’s more info to be found here.

Code Central

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I visit the VMTN Communities daily and recently noticed a new section called Code Central. I didn’t pay attention to it cause I thought it was a private section but apparently it is not. Nava Davuluri introduced this new section and his role within VMware recently in a blog article:

I’m Nava Davuluri, a new hire into Product Marketing. This is my third month at VMware and things are off to a great start! One of the highlight events at my job so far includes attending the new vSphere launch, where I got to see business leaders in computer technology talk about how VMware products are increasing efficiency(performance, power and hardware) control( security and service levels) and choice (hardware, OS and application architecture) for the next-generation of cloud computing. This has given me a perspective on how important these products are and also made me realize the importance of my role.

I was hired to manage the sample code arena for developers and system administrators that make up the majority of VMware developer community. My biggest goal here is to make your life easier. Yes!, by creating a community based sample code site where it will be easy to create, collect and share sample codes in one single straight forward page.

Some people have started adding scripts to this new section of the community already, take a look and contribute!

http://communities.vmware.com/community/developer/codecentral
http://blogs.vmware.com/codecentral/

New version of ESX Healthcheck script

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Long before people ever heard about the VI Toolkit the ESX Healthcheck ruled the earth. The ESX Healthcheck script used the esxcfg-* commands in the Service Console and dumped all the info into a html file.

Today a new version of ESX Healthcheck has been released(0.30) after two years of silence. It has taken them a long time but it’s worth it in my opinion. Anders is looking for people that want to help out developing the script, so if you are interested leave Anders a comment on his blog.

VMworld 2009 – TA2259 Ask the Experts Panel Session

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We are proud to officially announce the VMworld 2009 – Ask the Experts Panel Session.  This session will feature virtualization experts Rick Scherer, Scott Lowe, Duncan Epping, Chad Sakac and Tom Howarth answering your questions on virtual infrastructure design.  In the next week or so we will be posting sections on our blog sites for you to submit questions for review during the session, so stay tuned!

Session ID: TA2259
Session Title: Ask the Experts – Virtualization Design
Track: Technology and Architecture
Abstract: Are you running a virtual environment and experiencing some problems?  Are you planning an upgrade from VI3 to vSphere 4 and have some questions about the infrastructure architecture changes required?  Do you have a virtual infrastructure design and want it blessed by the experts?  Come join us for a one hour panel session where your questions are the topic of discussion!  Join the Virtualization Experts; Rick Scherer from VMwareTips.com, Scott Lowe author of Mastering vSphere 4, Duncan Epping from VMware, Chad Sakac from EMC and Tom Howarth from planetVM.net as they answer your questions on virtualization design.

I shamelessly copied this from vmwaretips.com… But I don’t think Rick will mind the extra promotion for this session!

Thanks vSphere, you will cost me my job!

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As some of you know I did a health check in Saudi Arabia a couple of weeks ago. A health check is a relatively short engagement. A couple of days on-site and a day off-site for a report. When vSphere went GA I started thinking about all the things I discovered during this particular health check. Now some might say that the things I discovered were low hanging fruit. The truth is that during health checks the things discovered are usually low hanging fruit. Usually it is not because the Sys Admins don’t have enough knowledge, but because they either don’t get any time to manage their environment properly or they’ve been doing it for so long they don’t see the obvious anymore… Don’t get me wrong, there is more to a health check than just the obvious stuff, but I merely want to point out the improvements vSphere brought us in terms of consistent installation / configuration and alarms / actions.

Here’s a short list of the obvious things I usually discover during a health check:

  • Snapshots
  • Lack of redundancy on Service Console or VMkernel
  • Inconsistent naming schemes(Port groups)
  • Inconsistent configuration
  • DNS configuration issues
  • Missing advanced HA settings
  • Faulty hardware
  • Free space on VMFS volumes

Unfortunately for me vSphere will catch most of these issues.

  • Snapshots
    Storage view
  • Lack of redundancy on Service Console or VMkernel
    HA will not configure correctly
  • Inconsistent naming schemes(Port groups)
    Host Profiles or Distributed vSwitch
  • Inconsistent configuration
    Host Profiles
  • DNS configuration issues
    Host Profiles (partly)
  • Missing advance HA settings
    currently not addressed
  • Faulty hardware
    Alarms
  • Free space on VMFS volumes
    Storage view & Alarms

Thanks vSphere, you will cost me my job… Only thing left is “DNS configuration issues” and “missing advanced HA settings”.