Computer Based Training for ESX

Hi all,

while surfing the Internet I came across a site on which you can find computer based training for a lot of different technologies. They have just released their CBT for ESX virtualization technology: I'm lucky and they send me the complete training to have a look to.

The course is very complete and presents also the technology that could go together with virtualization (P2V, VCB, third party software...).

All the course is divided in about twenty chapters: each chapter is an HQ video that explains the chapter subjects.

Nothing must be installed on your workstation and all the course chapters are attendable from your browser (in picture you can see the starting page of Disc 2 of the training)

However this kind of course do not give you the ability to get the VCP exam and if you are intrested in having the certification you MUST attend a classroom course teached by a Certified VmWare Trainer.

This course give you the ability to understand better what's going on in your virtual datacenter, if you have one, or to get a solid base to start virtualizing. The course is distributed by TrainSignal
Here are just some of the training you will find in Trainsignal VMware ESX Server Training Videos:

• Discover what virtualization is, the many ways to utilize it.
• Find out about the different types of virtualization.
• Find out how to select the right hardware needed for virtualization, RAM, CPU, Disk Storage.
• See the step-by-step installation process for VMware ESX Server, as well as for VMware Virtual Infrastructure and VMware Virtual Center
• Maintain your VMware ESX Server configuration and all of your virtual guest machines with the Virtual Infrastructure Client's visual interface, as well as the service console.
• Discover how to create virtual machines, virtual appliances, resource pools, clusters, and much more.
• Find out how to configure and manage VMware Server using VMware Management Interface and VMware Server Console.
• Learn how to use Tasks, Events, Alarms, and Maps in VMware ESX Server.
• Understand what Virtual Machine Snapshots are and how to use them.
• Discover the many different types of virtual networking with VMware and their advantages
• Learn how to clone and migrate virtual machines: V2V and P2V.
• Find out the different types of backups available for VMware, as well as third party companies.
• Get familiar with the new features in VMWare ESX Server 3.5 and VMware ESX Server 3i.
• Learn how to efficiently update VMware ESX Server with little to no downtime!

cheers
\mf

Patches released, 10 march 2008

We have some more patches for Virtual infrastructure:
check out these links:

• patches for 3.5 link
• patches for 3.0.2 link

for better manageability upgrade to Virtual Center 2.5 and use Update Manger

cheers

\mf

Have a nice day

some good humor for the geeks :)

cheers

\mf

Network device for virtualization

In Cannes, while walking around in Solutions Exchages open space, I've met a friend of mine at Intel booth, that give me a demo of Virtual Machine Device Queues: this is a new tecnology for improving network throughtput in virtualized environment.
Have a look to PDF whitepaper

cheers
\mf

Storage vMotion Plug-in (unsupported)

Hello all,
in LostCreation Site you can find an interesting (unsupported) plugin for Virtual Infrastructure Client. With this addon you can graphically execute Storage vMotion of your virtual machines between your 3.5 ESX physical hosts.
Have a look here

cheers
\mf

Interview with Richard Garsthagen

I'm inserting the interview that Virtualization.com bloggers Tarry Singh and Nicolas 'Charbax' Charbonnier have done in Cannes with Richard Garsthagen, Organizer of VMworld Europe 2008 and VMware Evangelist.





Thanks Tarry http://tarrysingh.blogspot.com/
cheers
\mf

Storage Deduplication

Starting from this article (in Italian) that's been posted in VMUG Italy Blog.

At Vmworld a new frontier for storage technologies has been presented by some hardware vendors: it's called deduplication (or deduping). With this technology you can save on space used by data on your storage "removing" the duplicates:

• while writing the data (inline deduplication)
• after the data has been written (post processing deduplication)

the choice between the two is based on the type of application you are running on the top of the storage (cloning, database, backup,...)

More info in the NetApp whitepaper about deduplication (PDF file)

cheers

\mf

Lot's of links from Vmworld 2008 bloggers

Hello all,
I'm back to the real world after a week in the "virtual" one: session of the conference were all good but I cannot manage to attend them all.
A lot of session were "sold out" and I cannot write on them all: on my last day in Cannes I've a quick talk with Mike Laverick about Vmworld 2008 and the differences we have seen since 3 years ago TSX in Paris. Mike, as always, has written some very good posts on his blog on technical and not-technical subject

• VDI and high performance printing
• The Party
• Software licensing exposed
• Virtualizing SQL
• Thinstall

A key role in Vmworld 2008 has been played by Richard. All the days busy, running here and there: thank you very much Richard!! Have a look to his blog articles about the convention in Cannes:

• Session introduction videos
• Vmworld progress update
• What a week

cheers

\mf

Running SAP ERP on Vmware – a customer example

The session has been introduced by Christoph Reisbeck (Director of Global SAP Allince @ Vmware). The technical part of the session has been led by a director of AddOn (Germany) that was responsible of the project by the customer.
First of all Christoph depicted the SAP customer pain point:
· Upgrades are time consuming
· Expensive and complex business continuity
· High operational costs
· Addressing compliance
With SAP in place you could (must…) have a lot of systems in different environment:
· Production
· Development
· Quality and Assurance (formally Q&A)
· (Training)
· … plus surrounding supporting servers
With Vmware you can achieve:
· Automated resource assurance (dynamic balance)
· Increased availability
· On demand capacity
Since December 2007 SAP is fully supported on Vmware Virtual Infrastructure for production environments, both for Windows and Linux.
The use of Vmware for SAP systems led to:
· Faster SAP upgrades (no need to wait for new hardware, snapshots to roll back, no need for SAP consultants in the first part of the migration)
· Business continuity (cost effective HA for all environments: prod, test, dev, Q&A, training)
· Less operational costs: less hardware, less power consumption, easier migration and consolidation
· Compliance: easy manteinance and migration of legacy systems, faster deployments, easy documentation of servers and asset management with the adoption of Vmware Lifecycle Manager.
More information in Vmware SAP solution community for service partner site: http://www.vcc-sap.com/
\mf

VI3 networking – Advanced Configuration and troubleshooting

This was a very technical session: speaker was Jean Lubatti that’s Product Support Engineer at Vmware.
He starts with some definition (vnic, vswitch and portgroup). The portgroup overview was expecially interesting (for me); in portgroups you can specify:
· VLANs configuration
· Teaming policies
· Layer 2 security policies
· Traffic shaping
Moreover portgroups are not VLANs: PG do not segment the vSwitches into separate broadcast domains unless they have different VLAN ID.
How can we implement VLANs? Two way:
· Virtual switches tagging (the easier way)
· External switches tagging (with virtual guest tagging in addition); this implies more work and more cabling
The native VLANs are fully supported by ESX (but pls, do not set any VLAN ID in vSwitches)
\mf

Optimizing Storage for VDI

The session was led by Tommy Armstrong (Vmware), Mike Slisinger and M.Vaughan Stewart (both from NetApp)
Tommy starts explaining the basics of VDI and introduces VDM2 (connection broker): with VDM2 we have:
· Automatic provisioning of desktop
· SSL encryption and Single Sign On
· USB redirection
· Active Directory and Secure ID integration
· High Availability and easy scalability
· DMZ support and Internet deployment
· Windows / MAC / Linux clients support
The session continues with the introduction of NetApp VDI facilitator that alleviate (a lot) the lengthy mass deployment timeframe: in the demo they deployed 100 VMs in about 2 minutes ( normally you can do a maximum of 5/10 VMs deployment per hour)
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Technical Track - What's new in VI 3.5

Session speaker was Leena Joshi and she give us an overview of 3i and 3.5
for 3i we have:

• compactness, 32 MB footprint
• architecture only, no installation needed
• wizard for deploying
• syslog stored in memory and tools to analyze it
• Distribuited Power Management (consolidate workload, place unneeded servers in standby and bring servers back online - minimizing power consumption and with no disruption of te VMs)

for 3.5 we have:

• Update manager (scan and remedies online and offline VMs and online ESX hosts, snapshot VMs before patching, integrated with DRS)
• Storage vMotion (FC only, zero downtime to VMs, LUN indipendent): this feature is not integrated with Virtual Infrastructure Client (...yet)
• HA now support up to 32 hosts cluster, with proactive cluster confcheck. As experimental feature there is individual VM failure monitoring
• VCB now support backup on iSCSI, NAS and local storage; you can use a virtual machine to run VCB and use Vmware Converter to restore the VMs.
• New OS support: Vista and Ubuntu
• up to 64 GByte of memory per VM and up to 256 GByte of RAM per host
• support for ethernet up to 10 GBit and Infiniband

There are a lot of benefit in application performance due to:

• Paravirtualization (now just for Linux, paravirt-ops with kernel > 2.6.21) that make guest OS virtualization aware: the major benefit are on large database, multiprocess applications, file server and web server because of net and disk I/O and context switching are better managed
• Large memory pages
• Network support for TCP segmentation Offload (reduce CPU overhead) and Jumbo Frames (with Jumbo Frame hardware enabled) with benefits on backup over lan, webserver, Citrix server and iSCSI

\mf

Technical Track - Honeypotting with VmWare (Basics)

Honeypots always attract me ;)
With the help of Deepak Narain and Thomas Huber, now I appreciate them more.




The session has begun with the definition of honeypot, that's a system used to attract bad guys and to collect everything they do; moreover it can be used to distract them from the real production environment.

How can we forge and honeypot?

• Decoy system: expose it on the internet offering services


• expose vulnerability to the bad guys


• monitor your box that must looks and behave as a normal - well designed - production system

Honeypots can be classified in two types:

• low interaction (or no interaction) that's based on emulation of services


• high interaction with full access for the bad guys to the OS and full "play around" with system

Using virtualization to forge an honeypot is better because:

• you can consolidate decoying a lot of system that's on a self contained physical machine


• VMs are self contained


• easiness of provisioning


• portability


• improved response to attack (just unplug network and you have done!)


• quickly reconfigurable and redeployable

unfortunatly also bad guys like those features

Why having an honeypot?

• We can learn from outside attack and remediate in the real production env.


• We can lure attack from real production.


• We quickly detect attack: that shouldn't be any traffic towards the honeypot normally: so, all traffic is hostile.


• We can have evidence: once an attacker is identified you can use evidences legally

Some projects are sprawling around the world: honeyd project is one of this.

\mf

Technical Track - VI3 Networking Best Practice

Today I've started attending Guy Brunsdon speech about best practice in configuring networking.

He started with basic on vSwitch telling that they behave as layer 2 physical switch (so no layer 3 routing).



He put strike on the importance of having network teaming to achieve:

• better use of bandwidth


• enhanced availability and performance

Another important feature to be used is VLAN tagging (that implies 802.1Q hardware), moreover in case of Virtual infrastructure deployed on blade system with lack of eth ports.

During the session, Guy explains how we can do nic teaming in ESX 3.x:

• Originating port ID


• Source MAC address


• IP Hash (static etherchannel required)

the tips is to choose for semplicity the "Originating port ID", but this can change based on your environment.

The virtual traffic types were classified:

• VMs Traffic


• vMotion traffic (must be dedicated and isolated)


• Management traffic (should be isolated, expecially if HA enabled)


• iSCSI traffic

He shows us some design examples, mostly for explaining the VLAN tagging techniques with lack of physical NICs

Last, but no least, vSwitches do not make use of Spanning Tree, so ports on physical switches should be configured as porfast or trunkfast to progress to forward state quickly.

\mf

Technical Track - Vmware Update Manager

Monica Sharma introduced us to the art of patching without downtime. The aim of Vmware Update Manager is to automate the process of:

• defining goals (policies)


• tracking measures (compliance)


• apply updates (remediation)

this process implies the risk of having invisible virtual machine (powered off VMs and templates): VUM takes care of those and patches them.

Basically VUM can patch ESX hosts, Microsoft VMs and Linux RHEL VMs; the infrastructure to get VUM working is Virtual Center + Update manager add-on. VUM let you create the baseline securities standard for your enterprise and applies it interactively or on a schedule basis.

\mf

Technical Track - Vmware Stage Manager

As third session I got Vmware Stage Manager overview. Eddie Dinel (Businnes Agility evangelist :) ) speech about this productthat allows you to automate and manage service transition. Stage Manager is something like Lab Manager but focused on services. With Stage Manager you can manage pre-production infrastructure, check compliance of services and have a visualization of the services in their various releases.


The supporting technology are linked clones (so RDM is not currently supported) and network fancing. For more information have a look to the Stage Manager Beta web page

\mf

Technical Track - Vmware Lifecycle Manager

Second session of my first day at Vmworld Europe.



Michael Adams and Brian Emerson introduced us to the automatization, management and control of the life of a virtual machine.



The VLM track VMs and report us on various states of VMs get during their existence. With Lifecycle manager you can define policy for creation, deployment, changes and retirement of VMs.



Brian show us a demo of the web access based inteface in which a requester can asks for a VM filling out requirement (OS, type of environment, ACLs, domain,...) and the approver can trigger the creation of the requeted VM.

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Technical Track - Vmware Site Recovery Manager

The first session I've attended was about the new opportunity offered by Vmware to have a DR orchestrator. Jay Judkowitz, Product Line Manager for DR and Data Protection at Vmware, in what way this add-on facilitate the disaster recovery managers life, automatizing failover in case of disaster and giving the ability to test on a regular basis the DR procedure (with non disruptive testing).

All the process are based on proprietary storage replica command and is orchestrated by Virtual Infrastructure: so we have storage replica and VMware tied together.

Features of SRM are:

• Setup of the workflow (DR plan is stored within Virtual Center, in a virtual runbook)


• Cross sites VC management (VMs get correctly organized on the secondary site, VMs have right CPU and memory allocation after failover, VMs are plugged in the right (v)LAN after failover)


• DR plan change control (rolebased access control, audit trails, recovery and test plans can be exported, changes to DR plan are instantly reflected in the test and failover environments)


• Failover workflow (automate failover with playback of virtual runbook


• Network management (VMs' IP changes automatically if needed, IP changes could be scripted to reflect the changes into DNS)


• Test workflow (run frequent non -disruptive testing, create a test network, export the results, increase the scope of DR plan, meet the compliance)

In order to use SRM you need to have two sites each with one VCM server. If you have more than two sites you'll have to work with sites pair.

For now you must use VMFS file system (RDM is experimental). The replication can be done within supported Fibre Channel and iSCSI storage.

\mf

VmWorld Europe 2008 - Partner Day

Hi all,
today the first Vmworld Europe has been opened at Palais des Festival in Cannes.

First of all Diane Greene (CEO) give a panoramic of Vmware technologies and, over the top, how the usage of Vmware can help the environment explaining the concept of "green data center".
Then we have the overview of the new goals of virtualization with Kartik Rau (Vice President of Marketing). Finally Carl Eschenbach (Executive Vice President of WW Field Ops) speaks about the future of Vmware and possible competitors for the next years

VmWorld Europe 2008

Hello all,
tomorrow I'm leaving Italy and traveling to Cannes to attend VmWorld Europe 2008!
I'm very happy 'cause maybe I'll meet some of you! I'll be blogging from there so STAY TUNED!!

cheers
\mf