We all have come to love many free services that we have integrated into our daily lives. Things like free email, free voice mail, free open source applications, free video streaming, social networking sites, operating systems, and many other services that make our lives better. At dailyhypervisor.com we are working on a new type of free service that can help all of you in the technical community. A free community lab. A free community lab would provide access to an environment that would grant everyone the opportunity to learn IT hands on and provide the ability for those who don’t have the means to test and learn about new technologies.
Tackling something of this scale will not be easy, but with help from the community hopefully we can make this something extraordinary. I personally will be donating some of my own lab equipment to the first generation of this lab environment. I’m currently working on building the lab for early beta testing by the end of March 2010. The first generation of this lab will consist of 3 servers running ESX4i. The servers have limited resources but each one consists of a single Quad-Core AMD Phenom 9850 processor, 8GB of Memory and access to 1TB of NFS storage. Access to the lab in the beginning will be by invite only much like other beta offerings. If you are interested in participating and leveraging this opportunity please register with dailyhypervisor.com and post a comment to this blog post stating your interest in participating. In your post please provide a brief description of how you would leverage this and also anything you would like to see available in the lab. All early beta users will be also to provide feedback on the lab and may be asked to participate as environment moderators once the lab goes GA. Much like community forums the goal is to make this community driven and supported by user moderators and the such.
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Categories: Community Lab, Free Stuff, XenServer, automation, vSphere Tags: Desktop Virtualization, ESX, vCenter, VI4, virtualization, VMware, vsphere
“The desktop deployment productivity tools that NetApp and DynamicOps offer significantly increase the value of virtual infrastructures by improving performance, providing essential data management resources, and reducing costs,” said Patrick Rogers, vice president of Solutions and Alliances, NetApp. “Enterprises and service providers can now offer multiple, cost-effective service level options for virtual desktop deployments by leveraging the unique orchestration of virtual storage capabilities that are part of the new DynamicOps solution.”
The full release can be found at http://www.dynmaicops.com/news/
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VMware SRM is gaining a lot of traction and many companies are quickly making it the defacto choice for DR in their environments, but is SRM the right choice? For those of you who haven’t had the opportunity to get familiar with SRM (Site Recovery manager), it is a Disaster Recovery automation product from VMware that integrates into vCenter. Through the use of SRA’s (Storage Replication Adapters) SRM is able to integrate with many storage arrays making it aware of Datastores that are replicated. Some of it’s most popular fetures include the ability to group servers in to recovery groups giving you the ability to fail groups of servers or a whole datacenter. It also allows you to perform live failover tests on the the same groups of servers or an entire site. These are some of the most popular reasons companies are implementing SRM. The ability to easily run DR tests without impacting live running systems has made it a huge success. SRM also allows you to create DR run book automation through the use of linear workflows that you create to perform different steps and tasks involved with failing over from the primary site to a secondary.
All of this is great stuff right? What could possibly be better that this? What can’t SRM do?
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Back in the summer, I saw Stu’s Post about automating the installation of ESXi. I was reminded again by Duncan’s Post. Then, I found myself in a situation when a customer bought 160 blades for VMware ESXi. With this many systems, it would be almost impossible to do this without mistakes. I took the ideas from Stu and Duncan and created an ESXi automated installer that works from a PXE deployment server, like the Ultimate Deployment Appliance. I took it a step further and added the ability to use a USB stick or a CD for those times when PXE is not allowed. The document below is a result of it.
This is a little different than the idea of a stateless ESXi server, where the hypervisor actually boots from PXE. This is the installer booting from PXE so that the hypervisor can be installed on local disk, an internal USB stick or SD card. You could also use it for a “boot from SAN” situation, but extreme care should be taken so you don’t accidentally format a VMFS disk.
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Categories: Cloud Computing, ESX 4, ESXi, Scriptng, VMware, automation Tags: Automated Deployment, ESXi, Installation, VI4, VMware, vsphere
A whitpaper was posted in the VMTN communities Thursday outlining the differences between the ESX 3.x and ESX 4.x service console. It further offers resources for transitioning COS based apps and scripts to ESXi via the vSphere Management Assistant and the vSphere CLI. Also mentioned briefly was the vSphere PowerCLI. If you are a developer or write scripts for VMware environments, also check out the Communities Developer section.
I hear it time and time again…The full ESX console is going away. ESXi is the way to go. I know there are valid arguments for keeping ESX around, but they are few. Failing USB keys may be a valid argument, but I have not heard of this happening. If that is the case, use boot from SAN. You need SAN anyway. As for hung VM processes, there are a few ways to address this in ESXi.
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If you know Steve Chambers you know he just moved to Cisco. Before that, he was with VMware and has been a pillar of the VI:OPS boards. He is now working on a document about Unified Event Management and in the spirit of community, he is looking for comments, suggestion, etc. He called my attention to the post via Twitter as we were discussing Splunk and it’s capabilities for “Centralized Event Aggregation” (Steve’s terms). Take a look at his post when you get a chance and make some comments. You know that I have heralded the benefits of a centralized logging server. Steve just plain gets it.
And since I mentioned Cisco, I also discovered that Cisco put out a whitepaper on their take regarding the Virtualization Blueprint for the Datacenter. Its their take on how virtualization will benefit your business. The chart shows how a business’ agility will increase as we climb the lifecycle from consolidation to virtualization and then on to automation.
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