vDestination: you're virtually there

I’ve added NetApp NCDA to my cert lineup!

gregwstuart — Mon, 14 May 2012 19:18:46 +0000

This past week I traveled to San Antonio, Texas for the NetApp Advanced NCDA bootcamp. It was pretty hardcore, going from 8am to 6pm everyday and then I spent 3 to 4 hours studying into the wee hours of the night. Needless to say, my hard work paid off and I passed the NS0-154 exam and gained the NetApp Certified Data Management Administrator certification. It’s the first storage oriented cert I picked up, it’s way past due, what’s VMware without storage? A big thanks to my instructor Mark K. for making last week a success, read his bio here, and if you are planning on taking this class make sure Mark is your instructor. The class was well put together and the course material was easy to read and understand. It was a first class experience all around. My only complaint were the carb heavy fried lunches that they brought in for us each day, it was a battle to stay awake after such meals as pizza, lasagna, mac and cheese, garlic bread and a bunch of other sleep inducing lunches. My advice would be to eat little or find an alternative for what they bring in for lunch. I owe a thank you to Chris Coleman as well, he helped me along the way to find all the study resources I needed to be successful with NetApp training, thanks a ton Chris. Last but certainly not least, a big thanks to Insight Investments for sending me to training, and allowing me to broaden my skillset by adding some NetApp knowledge.

I’m a vExpert 2 years running!

gregwstuart — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 22:11:16 +0000

I got the official notice from VMware that I’ve been awarded the vExpert 2012 award! I was given this award last year for the first time and I’m more excited this year after spending a year reaping the many benefits of being a vExpert. The only benefit I didn’t get to use last year was attending the vExpert party at VMworld 2011 sponsored by CTO Steve Herrod. I hope to get the invite this year to that party, I’ve heard nothing but great things about it. Thanks to VMware for recognizing me and my efforts over the past year. I’m humbled to be in such great company with the other vExperts. Here’s the list that was publicized by VMware, have a look at the others on the list and congratulate them if you can.

What To Expect at the VMware Forum 2012

gregwstuart — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 10:00:16 +0000

I’m sitting here in the John Wayne Airport in Santa Ana, CA waiting to board my plane back to Phoenix. Unfortunately, my flight was delayed two hours so I thought I would write a blog post about my experience at the VMware Forum 2012 that kicked off today in Garden Grove, CA. Let me just say right off the bat, it’s worth it! I always seem to start going through VMworld withdrawals right about the time April rolls around, we’ve still got 4 months before VMworld 2012 kicks off, so this was a really nice event to hold me over. I’m not sure how many people were in attendance, if I had to guess I would say somewhere in the ballpark of 600. If you are planning on going, great! If you are on the fence, let me break down how my day went at the VMware Forum and maybe I can sway your decision. Here it goes…

Register For The Event
This step was a piece of cake, I just went to VMware.com and the registration link is right on the home page. If you don’t get a chance to register, they have a bunch of iPads at the registration desk and you can register on the spot, no penalty. Oh, also, it’s a free event (well, they scan your badge and take your email and contact info, so it comes at the cost of spam and cold calls).
Once you register, which took all of about 10 seconds, they give you a nifty little VMware/EMC branded badge with lanyard and you are off to the races.

Network at the Partner Pavillion
Next up for me was the Partner Pavillion which was in the Grand Ballroom at the Hyatt Regency Garden Grove, think of it as a mini Solutions Exchange floor. I spent the first hour at the Forum cruising the floor, visiting with companies like VMware, Nutanix, Riverbed, EMC, F5, Acronis, Virsto, Global Knowledge, Mozy (EMC), HDS, Veeam, Wyse, Insight Integrated and others. If you’ve experienced VMworld before, much like the Solutions Exchange floor, the Partner Pavillion will give you the opportunity to meet with marketing and SEs from the various companies as they give you demos of some of the cutting edge technology that partners nicely with VMware. Also like VMworld, there is plenty of swag, I didn’t go overboard like at VMworld, I got way with a t-shirt (that’s one t-shirt) a couple of pens and a VMUG ball cap which my son will love. There were plenty of giveaways as well, I counted at least 4 iPads, a $500 Apple Store gift card, a remote control helicopter, two Kindle Fires, an Apple TV, an iPod Nano and a one hundred-dollar bill! I didn’t win anything, oh well.

Attend a Breakout Session
After getting in some good networking over at the Partner Pavillion, my next stop was a breakout session on the topic of The Post PC-Era and End User Computing. This session was sponsored by Wyse, it included a half hour presentation from VMware on transitioning IT into the post-PC era. Topics like BYOT or BYOD (bring your own technology/device) were discussed and how to handle those situations as an IT manager. VMware View was touched on which is where Wyse came in with their thin clients, cloud clients and zero clients. It was a good session, enjoyable and I learned a lot. My one complaint was that the VMware employee who was handling the VMware part of the presentation, couldn’t answer a single question from the audience. There were literally 3 or 4 questions regarding licensing and thin client hardware that she repeatedly answered with “I’ll have to get back to you on that” I’m not sure when she planned on getting back to us, but the audience was pretty annoyed with that. Even the other VMware employee in the room couldn’t answer the questions and made no attempt to track down the answers. Note to VMware, make sure the presenters are super technical, we’re going to ask super technical questions. The other breakout session I attended was extremely helpful and very technical. This session was focused on vCenter Operations, which is an incredible piece of the puzzle as far as monitoring goes. The presenter was prepared, didn’t put us to sleep and answered every question, kudos to him!

Get Some Lunch
Lunch was provided which was really great. It was a box lunch consisting of your choice of ham and swiss on a croissant, turkey and havarti on a potato roll, or the veggie selection of tomato and mozzarella with basil. It included an apple, a cookie, chips and a wet nap which came in handy (nothing worse than greasy fingers on a smart phone screen). Lunch was followed with refreshments, Diet Pepsi (thank you VMware!!!!), and a ton of other soda and coffee, it was also a welcome refreshment.

All the Diet Pepsi I can drink!!! Beautiful!

Last but not least, the Hands on Labs
This past VMworld, if you attended, you got to witness and awe-inspiring display of hands on labs. This was a bit smaller than VMworld, but the labs were just as good. I had to wait in line for about 15 minutes, not nearly as bad as VMworld, and then I was ushered into the Labs where I decided to do the “Building a Hybrid Cloud” lab. The lab took me approximately 1.5 hours, I hadn’t really played with vCloud Director much, so it was slow going but I loved it. Nothing like kicking the tires on a fully licensed VMware product. I would have done more labs, but time was short. Nonetheless, it was well worth the time to sit, take a breather and work on the hands on lab.

Heading Home
The event wrapped at about 4:30pm and it was a mad dash to the taxi line at the hotel for a lift to the airport. I got to John Wayne airport sat down for some great Mexican food at Javi’s in the terminal (don’t pass this up if you are ever in the area) and then finished it off with some incredible frozen yogurt from Pinkberry. It was a great trip, out and back in a day, I’ll be glad to be home and looking forward to apply what I learned from the VMware Forum 2012.

My Review of PHD Virtual Monitor for vSphere

gregwstuart — Tue, 10 Apr 2012 09:00:44 +0000

This year has been the year of the home lab for me. I’ve been putting the pieces together for a great home lab. It all started with the purchase of a nice white box that I chose to run Windows 7 on, and then on top of it, VMware Workstation 8 (a great hosted hypervisor option). I’ve got a nested installation of ESXi 5 on two separate boxes, one named SHEPPARD and the other LOCKE (can you guess what my favorite all time show is?). I installed vCenter, and I’ve just started to build out several different VMs. I have a Windows 7 box, a Server 2008 R2 box (running vCenter), an Ubuntu box and an RHEL box, not a bad start at all! From there I’ve started looking for 3rd party applications that I can install to compliment vCenter and give me the opportunity to kick the tires a bit. Thanks to the good people at PHD Virtual, I was able to get a NFR key for their PHD Virtual Monitor offering. I dove in, and started installing it right off the bat. I have to say it is probably the single easiest piece of 3rd party software that I’ve had to install yet. I’ll walk through the process of installing first, and then share my thoughts on it.

Installing PHD Virtual Monitor

Step 1
The first order of business was to go out to the website and actually download the package in either 32 or 64bit versions. The files are downloaded to a .zip folder and after extracting all the files, I found the .exe and double clicked it.

Step 2
After launching the application file and running through the piece of cake wizard, I found the desktop icon which was installed and double clicked it to run PHD Virtual Monitor for the first time. Now, if you don’t have an NFR key or haven’t actually purchased it a license, by launching the program you will enable a 15 day trial of the product. My thought is that 15 days is pretty short, especially when you have the 60 day eval of ESXi in hand. At least make give it a 30 day trial, something to think about. Anyhow, this is a snapshot of what the home screen looks like:

Step 3
Your next step would be to click on the configuration tab on the home screen and enter either your vCenter Server IP and credentials or your ESXi host IP and credentials. This will allow the agent to contact your host or vCenter Server and gather the information it needs to begin monitoring your infrastructure. Once you click on the configure tab and then click ‘Introduction’ you will be prompted to enter your data, this is the screen that you will see next:

Once you have clicked ‘Introduction’ and then clicked ‘Configure Virtual environment’, select next and then click ‘Add’ and this is where you will add your host or vCenter IP and credentials. Here’s a screenshot of where you will enter your IP and credentials.

Get To Monitoring!
Once you have connected to your server or host, you are ready to begin monitoring your environment. What I like best about this software is the many tools you can use and the single pane of glass from which you can monitor it all. Some of the many metrics that you can monitor are memory, CPU usage, storage, event logs and more. Here are some of the screen shots of the monitoring in action:

Screenshot #1

Screenshot #2

Screenshot of the inventory page showing my actual PC and also one of my ESXi boxes running vSphere 5:

Conclusion
Alright, hopefully the screenshots in this post have given you a good idea of what to expect should you decide to kick the tires on PHD Virtual Monitor for VMware vSphere. I only have one gripe about this software, the eval period is not nearly long enough. As I mentioned earlier, we get 60 days evaluation of vSphere 5, the least PHD can do is offer a 30 day trial instead of their measly 15 days. The software is sound, and I really like the GUI. When I’m evaluating a product my big points are, “Is it easy to install?” “Is it worth my time installing and configuring it?” and “Does it do anything different that vCenter already does inherently?” Virtual Monitor satisfies all of my stipulations, it’s easy to install for sure, it was worth my time and it’s a viable 3rd party product to vSphere. In my opinion you can’t be too granular with monitoring of your virtual environment. There you have it, go out and download the 15 day free trial of PHD Virtual Monitor for VMware vSphere (or one of those other hypervisors) and have fun.

Disclaimer: PHD Virtual is a vDestination blog sponsor, but my opinions in this review have in now way been influenced or swayed by PHD Virtual itself. These are my own words and do not reflect any hand fed documentation from PHD Virtual.

A New Beginning…

gregwstuart — Thu, 22 Mar 2012 17:28:03 +0000

I’m happy to announce that I’m starting a new beginning with Insight Investments on Monday morning! I’ve been working as a contractor for the better part of 2 years now and I’m happy to be taking on a full-time permanent position with Insight here in Phoenix, Arizona. I will be working out of the I/O Datacenter in Phoenix, an impressive place! My new title is Cloud Services Administrator, leading a team of 5 administrators manning the Cloud Services offering from Insight. This also means I am officially working for a VMware Partner for the first time in my career… see you at the PEX next year! Many thanks to Insight for bringing me on board, I’m looking forward to a great career with Insight in an ever-changing tech world.

*My blog will remain mine, and is in no way affiliated with Insight or its products.

Brian Madden brings his VDI show to Phoenix

gregwstuart — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 23:42:58 +0000

This is pretty late notice, but if you are in the Phoenix area, heck, anywhere in Arizona and can make it for a desktop virtualization seminar featuring Brian Madden, here’s your chance. Brian Madden will bring “Desktop Virtualization 2012” seminar to Phoenix, Arizona tomorrow March 15th (yeah, I said it was short notice). Here’s a blip from Tech Target’s website:

Specific topics covered at this event include: The adoption rate of desktop virtualization (and why everyone isn’t doing it despite what the vendors may lead you to believe) An update on the latest desktop virtualization & VDI products (Citrix, Microsoft, VMware, Quest, etc.) Desktop virtualization is not about saving money (unless you lie with your cost analysis) Don’t forget about the traditional desktops (desktop virtualization is more about “desktops” and less about “virtualization”) The fact that Windows is old and is making our lives difficult Client-based desktops Client hypervisors Data center-based desktops Remoting protocols (PCoIP, HDX, RemoteFX, etc.) Cloud-based desktops (Do these really threaten the Windows way of life?) Storage & IOPS TS versus VDI Application Virtualization (App-V, ThinApp, etc.) Disk layering and disk image sharing User-installed apps User Virtualization (User profiles, user personalization) One desktop per user The “Desktop” versus the “desktop” The future of Windows SaaS apps vs. Windows apps (Do we have to deal with ChromeOS?) The consumerization of IT (Should we be worried?)

The seminar starts tomorrow March 15th at 8am and will last until 1pm, but I’m sure there will be plenty of discussions that last well into the afternoon following the end of the seminar. Unfortunately, due to customer needs, I won’t be able to make it. If you go, plan on leaving me a comment on what you thought, I would love to hear all about it. If you aren’t in the Phoenix Metro Area, don’t fret, there are other dates that might be a bit closer to you, although the weather won’t be nearly as nice (I promise). Here are the next confirmed dates:

Tuesday, March 27 Dallas, TX Hyatt Regency Dallas

Tuesday, April 3 Detroit, MI Detroit Marriott at Renaissance Center

Thursday, April 5 San Diego, CA Manchester Grand Hyatt

There are many other dates, but they haven’t been confirmed as of yet. Don’t miss an opportunity to attend a great seminar and learn more about the Desktop Virtualization craze in 2012. Register now!

Profile Management in VMware View 5

gregwstuart — Fri, 09 Mar 2012 14:00:22 +0000

It seems as if the end of standard desktop computing has all but come to an end, or will shortly. Many companies have thrown out the inflexible desktop PC model for their employees for a much better suited virtual desktop model. What does this do? For starters it gives the end-user much more freedom than they’ve ever had with their desktop PC. These days there are numerous options for end points that are suitable to load your virtual desktop on. You can be at the ball game, working on your virtual desktop via VMware View which is all accessed from a client loaded on your iPad. The possibilities are endless.

Many times as an end-user you don’t question the “how” of your desktop, you just log in and want it to boot up without any issues and you want it done fast. There are many things that go on behind the scenes in a VDI environment and one of the most important things is profile or persona management. Why is it important? That’s a good question and one that is not usually given a second thought; that is of course until something goes wrong and your desktop is hung on “applying personal settings” for 20 minutes. That is when the “how” of VDI gets questioned.

Read the full article at Petri.co.il.

Want to go to VMworld 2012 or TechEd 2012 for free? Veeam wants to send you…

gregwstuart — Wed, 07 Mar 2012 15:44:35 +0000

This morning I received an email from Veeam announcing a new competition for virtualization lovers. Do you love virtualization? Veeam claims if you love virtualization, then you love Veeam. That’s a compelling thought, is this true for you? Do you love virtualization, and if so, do you love Veeam? The competition isn’t really a competition per se, but a giveaway. Veeam is giving away a full conference pass to either VMworld 2012(San Francisco) or TechEd 2012(Orlando), your choice! That is a sweet deal! I know VMworld is around $2000 depending on when you register for it, and TechEd is in the same ballpark. I can vouch for VMworld, I’ve been 2 times, and it’s an incredible 4 days. Can’t say much about TechEd since I’ve never been, but I’m sure it’s a great conference as well. Check out the video from Veeam below on why virtualization lovers love Veeam:

Now get over to Veeam’s site and register for your chance to win a full conference pass to VMworld or TechEd 2012. I’ll be at VMworld this year for sure, and it’s never too early to start making plans, only one person can win this pass, so have a backup plan in place. You can rest assured vDestination will have some good news on getting to VMworld shortly, but for now, Veeam’s your best shot at a free pass! Good luck.

vExpert 2011 Gift and Certificate

gregwstuart — Fri, 02 Mar 2012 16:46:22 +0000

Happy Friday to everyone, the weekend is finally upon us. This week has been a long one for some reason. I recently received my vExpert 2011 gift and certificate from Alex and John at VMware, and I’m very pleased. The bag is really nice, and the vExpert logo is nicely stitched on, really good quality. Thanks again to VMware for recognizing me as a vExpert for 2011 and thanks go out to Alex Maier and John Troyer for making sure we got some really nice stuff. Hopefully I can join the ranks of the 2012 vExpert program, it’s sure to be a good one. Below is a picture of the gifts. Have a good weekend.

Book Review: Administering VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.0

gregwstuart — Thu, 01 Mar 2012 19:24:33 +0000

I recently received a review copy of Mike Laverick’s new book, Administering VMware Site Recovery Manager 5.0 from VMware Press. First off, this book is incredible! If you are looking to brush up on SRM 5.0, this is a must have book. What is interesting to note about this book is that is one of the first books published by VMware Press, and it’s a gem. VMware Press is really putting together some nice books, thanks to all the amazing authors in the community and Mike Laverick is no exception. If you know Mike, you know he’s pretty much the go to guy for SRM, know to some as “Mr. SRM”. If you don’t know who Mike is, his blog, RTFM Education, is one of the top 10 virtualization blogs rated annually by Eric Siebert at vSphere-Land.com. Here is a short bio taken from Mike’s blog:

RTFM Education is a website/blog create by me, Mike Laverick

I am a freelance/contract instructor/trainer and I specialise in Citrix and VMware Products, and my customers and partners include IBM, HP (France, Belgium, Finland, Denmark) SureSkills (Ireland) and CDG (Netherlands). I work across the UK and Europe – and have delivered training for such organisations as United Nations in Italy and Shell in Nigeria.

I’ve worked in the IT Industry since 1993 and for my sins I am quite heavily qualified with certifications such as

VMware Certified Instructor
VMware Certified Professional
Citrix Certified Instructor
Citrix Certified Administrator
Citrix Certified Enterprise Administrator
Microsoft Certified Systems Engineer (NT4,W2K,W2K3)
Microsoft Certified Trainer (Retired)
A+ Certified Engineer (Retired)
A+ Certified Trainer (Retired)

At a total of 528 pages and weighing in at 2.26 pounds, the book is not overwhelming and easy to transport unlike most of your technical books packing over 1,000 pages and weighing over 4 pounds. Now that we know about the author, the weight of the book and the number of pages, let’s look at what is covered in the book.

What’s Covered?
This book extensively covers what is behind administering VMware’s SRM 5.0 feature. Important to point out that the book’s subtitle is “Technology Hands-On”, and that is exactly what it is. The book doesn’t only provide prose, but it gives real work examples and screen shots to help the reader gain a good understanding of what they might see when tasked with administering SRM 5.0. Too often we get tech books that just don’t provide enough real world experience and are very difficult to read cover to cover, this book is exactly the opposite. It stats off with a nice introduction to Site Recovery Manager, hitting on what’s new to version 5.0 as well as a nice section on “A Brief History of Life before VMware SRM”. What I also liked about the first chapter of the book is that Mike does a nice job of differentiating what is a Disaster Recovery (DR) technology and what isn’t a DR technology. Things like vMotion, High Availability (HA), and Fault Tolerance (FT) are listed as not being viable options to base your infrastructure’s DR plan on.

Chapters 2 and 3 cover how to get started with configuring replication on different storage platforms such as Dell EqualLogic and EMC Celerra, which is great if you employ those technologies in your datacenter (Mike also covers NetApp as well, further into the book). Chapter 7 is one of the more important and extremely helpful chapters in the whole book, it covers Installing VMware SRM. Mike does an excellent job of covering networking components involved, storage replication and VMware components all with ample screenshots and real world examples. The final chapter of the book covers upgrading SRM 4.1 to 5.0, which can also be helpful to any admins still running 4.1 in their environment, but looking to upgrade to vSphere 5.

Should I Buy It?
If you are a vSphere 5 admin, there is no question as to whether or not you should buy this book, but it! What I try to do is build my library around all vSphere components if only to have a resource to reach out to in the chance that I need help installing and configuring that component or upgrading, or simply as a troubleshooting guide. This book is a great addition to my library and I know you would appreciate having it in your library as well. Some VMware books out there are difficult for the Jr. Admin to just pick up and start reading, this is not the case with Administering VMware SRM 5.0. It’s well written, and organized in a fluid manner, you could read this book cover to cover no problem, can’t say that about all tech books. Whether you are looking to learn more about SRM, or are looking for an installation and fine tuning guide, this is your book. Thanks to Mike for all the work he put into this book, and thanks to VMware Press for all the work they do in getting these books from start to finish.

More titles from Mike Laverick:

VMware vSphere 4 Implementation

Administering VMware Site Recovery Manager 4.0

For more great VMware Books see my past posts: Mastering VMware vSphere 5 , Top 5 VMware Books List, and Do You Own These VMware Books? You Should!