VMware

Back to Basics: Install, configure and use vSphere Replication

Duncan Epping · Sep 17, 2012 ·

One of the coolest features that has been included with vSphere 5.1 in my opinion is vSphere Replication. (Make sure to read the what’s new paper) The reason for it being is that it now brings “advanced” technology to everyone (Essentials Plus and upwards). I have used vSphere Replication in 5.0 and it was nice, but with 5.1 the installation and configuration process has been improved. For instance the database is now included in the appliance and it isn’t as DNS sensitive as it was with 5.0. This makes installing and configuring it a matter of minutes.

I am going to assume you have “vSphere Replication” traffic enabled on a VMkernel NIC, if you do not know how to create a VMkernel NIC check this article

Lets get started. I downloaded the vSphere Replication virtual appliance and imported and configured it in just a couple of steps using the vSphere 5.1 Web Client: [Read more…] about Back to Basics: Install, configure and use vSphere Replication

Back to Basics: Using the vSphere 5.1 Web Client to configure a vSwitch

Duncan Epping · Sep 13, 2012 ·

In the previous articles we created a Datacenter, a cluster and added hosts to it. Now that we have done that we can start finalizing the configuration. This is just one example out of the many ways to configure networking for an ESXi host, and I kept it really really simple. This is not following any best practices, I just wanted to show some of the steps. In this scenario I have 4 network cards per host and I have VLANs for each network segment. Separating traffic through the use of VLAN is highly recommended and is a best practice.

Lets configure the virtual switch first. I will use a “standard vSwitch” for now. In this case we will set all vmnics to active on the vSwitch and control NIC usage on a portgroup level. [Read more…] about Back to Basics: Using the vSphere 5.1 Web Client to configure a vSwitch

90% of all vSphere 5.1 Clustering Deepdive books sold are virtual

Duncan Epping · Sep 7, 2012 ·

I was just checking the sales numbers of the vSphere 5.1 Clustering Deepdive and 90% of all vSphere 5.1 Clustering Deepdive books sold on Amazon are e-book copies. Both Frank and I are heavy supporters of e-books and hence the reason we priced all of our books aggressively. Just some facts for the 5.1 book:

100 pages extra content
Stretched Cluster section added and Storage DRS section fully rewritten
Over 3000 copies sold in under two weeks (wooohooooooooooo)
Over 200 paper copies sold at VMworld
Available on paper for just $ 24.95
Available as an ebook for just $ 7.49
(location based pricing so may vary)
Yes this book contains all 5.0 info with call-outs to what has changed in 5.1!

While we are at it, I just enabled the vSphere 5.0 Clustering Deepdive book for the Kindle Lending Library. But for $ 4.99 you can’t really go wrong. The 4.1 HA/DRS Deepdive is still available for only $ 0.99, and there might just be another opportunity to pick it up for $ 0.- next week between the 11th and the 13th of September.

INF-STO2192 – Tech Preview of VMware Distributed Storage

Duncan Epping · Sep 4, 2012 ·

I could visit just one session on Tuesday so I decided I would attend a session which is on a topic that I love “Software Defined Storage”, aka vCloud Distributed Storage. This session was hosted by Christos Karamanolis and Kiran Madnani. Christos is one of the lead engineers on the project and Kiran is the product manager, both VMware employees.

Before I lay down what their session was about, note that this was a technology preview. No commitments have been made when or even IF this will ever be released… but as the demo looked so promising I figured it was worth sharing.

[Edit: Cormac Hogan published the demo, worth watching!]

Kiran started out with explaining the journey to Software Defined Storage. Awesome features he mentioned were Storage vMotion, Storage DRS, SIOC, Profile Driven Storage, vSphere Replication and more. Kieran made a statement which I can only agree with….

The world is changing, compute resource keep growing, data keeps on growing!

Demo time – Consuming vCloud Director 5.1 resources in 10 minutes…

Duncan Epping · Aug 29, 2012 ·

We all know how difficult it can be to implement and configure a new infrastructure. Racking, cabling, configuring VLANs, setting policies / permissions, firewalling etc. It is a lot of work… Well in a physical world it is a lot of work, in a vCloud Director environment that is slightly different. In this demo that I recorded I am going to show you:

Login as a vCloud Admin
- How to create an organization
- How to create an organization virtual datacenter
  - Selecting a specific compute tier
  - Selecting all storage tiers
  - Selecting a specific networking tier
- How to create an Edge Gateway
- How to create add a vApp to a Catalog
Login as the tenant:
- Deploy a 3-tier vApp with each VM on a different storage tier
- Snapshot the full vApp

All of that in under 10 minutes, I could do it faster… but I guess it would be difficult to watch then :). Anyway, I hope this demo shows how easy it is to provide access and resources to a tenant in a vCloud environment .