vTwitter Accounts You Must Follow
These accounts are listed in no particular order of importance or value, they’re all equally good in my opinion.

VMware Social Media
John Troyer
Alex Maier
VMware Communities
Tony Dunn

VCDX, enough said.
Jason Boche
Duncan Epping
Fran Denneman
Scott Lowe
Doug Baer
Andrea Mauro

vExperts and Top Bloggers
Kendrick Coleman
Greg Stuart (yes, shameless self promotion)
Edward Haletky
Damian Karlson
Cody Bunch
Maish Saidel-Keesing
David Davis
Eric Sloof
Calvin Zito
Eric Siebert
Planet V12n
Top 25 vBlogs

Who Did I Miss?
If there is someone I missed who should be on this list, please don’t take it personal. In fact, if you feel like you’ve been missed and should be listed, please leave a comment and let us know. Take a second and share your own list of vTwitter accounts that should be followed, everyone has their own opinion.

February is coming to an end, but not without two great webinars from StarWind Software. If you are trying to learn more about Microsoft’s Hyper-V or you want to know more about a great solution for iSCSI SAN, pay attention to the webinars coming this week and next. Here are a list of the webinars and what they will cover:

Live Webinar: Backup and Recovery Strategies for Hyper-V
Thursday, February 23, 2012 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM GMT
Protecting virtual server systems and data can be challenging. However, dealing with Microsoft Hyper-V environments and virtual machines you have more options available to you than you did when backing up traditional tin servers. StarWind delivers backup and recovery solution designed specifically for Hyper-V virtual environments. Register now.

Live Webinar: StarWind iSCSI SAN 5.8: One Powerful Solution for Every Type of Need
Tuesday, February 28, 2012 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM GMT
Data growth, backup complexity, and compound resources are the challenges that can obstruct effective data protection and limit the availability and ultimately the value of your business-critical data. The newest version of the StarWind iSCSI SAN solution overcomes these barriers through High Availability, Global Deduplication, Disaster Recovery (DR) and VM Backup.
Join Anatoly Vilchinsky as he explains how StarWind iSCSI SAN 5.8 can help you reduce costs and achieve greater storage agility and ultimate data availability. Register now.

Planning On Attending?
If you plan on attending and would like to join me for a roundtable discussion Thursday night February 23rd and/or Tuesday night February 28th please leave a comment on this post. I’m trying to gauge interest in doing regular roundtable discussions that we can record and share with the rest of the blogosphere after a webinar. Discussion will cover what’s been presented, how the presentation was (ie. too much marketing, not enough details or terrible presenter), and we’ll discuss if the software/hardware being presented is worth looking at. Let me know if you are interested, I look to make this a regular post series. Thanks for reading.

I’ve encountered a situation many times in the past where the vCenter Server database needs to be migrated from one back end Microsoft SQL Server to another. I’ve also heard this how-to question asked from a number of different people. The scenario can present itself in a number of cases.

• The SQL server has reached capacity.
• The SQL server is performing poorly, impacting applications.
• The SQL server is being repurposed.
• The SQL server is being decommissioned.
• The SQL server is being replaced by a newer hardware platform, OS, or SQL version.
• The SQL server has failed and is being rebuilt.
• The database is being migrated from a local SQL Express instance on the vCenter Server to a dedicated SQL Server.

Whatever the case may be, you’ll typically be served an eviction notice well in advance by your DBA. The process isn’t all that difficult. I’ve been through it several times and to me it’s more an annoyance than anything. I’ll explain why in a bit.

With most client/server applications I’ve worked with back ended by MS SQL, the process to migrate a database is easy:

1. I shut down the application tier.
2. Instruct DBA to migrate the database properly (this is the heavy lifting step, includes a backup, migrating logins, etc.)
3. I modify the ODBC connection.
4. I start the application tier.

vCenter database migration isn’t so straight forward. Where it deviates is step 3 because one cannot simply modify the ODBC configuration to point vCenter at the new location of its back end database. The reason for this is because the vCenter database has associated SQL Agent rollup jobs which are installed on the SQL server by vCenter during its installation process. SQL Agent rollup jobs are not stored inside either of the .mdf or .ldf database files. Rather, they are stored in the MSDB database which is why the dbo role is temporarily needed on MSDB when installing vCenter Server – so that the vCenter installation routine can inject the rollup jobs. While on the surface it may seem like simply changing the ODBC connection does work to migrate a database, you’ll find out later on the rollup jobs aren’t running and you’ll probably wind up reading VMware KB Article 1004382 Updating rollup jobs after the error: Performance data is currently not available for this entity to troubleshoot problems you are experiencing in the vSphere Client.

Getting back to what I said earlier about database migration being an annoyance, I say this because I can’t use the typical ODBC based approach which is usually quick and painless for other client/server applications. Rather, it requires uninstalling/reinstalling vCenter Server (in addition to making the ODBC change) to make sure those SQL Agent rollup jobs end up at the new SQL Server location. That said, the vCenter uninstall/reinstall process today runs clean without issues or pitfalls like we had in the past such as overwriting the database or creating a new parallel set of tables with prefixes. Each of those scenarios lead to a brand new empty datacenter when logging into the vSphere Client for the first time. Not good. This uninstall/reinstall migration process looks like this:

1. Uninstall vCenter Server, preserve SSL cert keys.
2. Migrate .mdf and .ldf database files to new SQL server, attach database, recreate/sync logins.
3. Update ODBC configuration.
4. Reinstall vCenter Server.

While reinstalling vCenter Server is annoyance, it is also the most reliable, trusted, and quickest method for me. There is another option for migrating the vCenter SQL Server database and that is outlined in VMware KB Article 7960893 Moving the vCenter Server SQL database. This article contains several steps with supporting links for each step. It goes like this:

1. Stop vCenter Server services.
2. Migrate .mdf and .ldf database files to new SQL server, attach database, recreate/sync logins.
3. Recreate SQL Agent rollup jobs following VMware KB Article 1004382 Updating rollup jobs after the error: Performance data is currently not available for this entity.
4. Update ODBC configuration.
5. Start vCenter Server services.

While this method doesn’t involve reinstalling vCenter Server, to me it is a bit more error prone and tedious which means potential problems Monday morning and time spent troubleshooting the issue. In the end, an uninstall/reinstall of vCenter may be required to resolve a SQL Agent rollup job related problem anyway. With the importance of vCenter’s role escalating with products such as vCloud Director or VMware View, unscheduled down time of vCenter can be more impactful than it was in the past. If you need to migrate the vCenter Server database, follow the migration plan which is best suited for you and your organization. Above all, back up your database and SSL cert keys before you begin.

Max Maier

Why should I get the free copy?
Well…VMware View is really a wonderful piece of software in which I’m personally interested in.
I’m a big fan of VDI and everything which I’ve seen and experienced from View so far is just great. Unfortunatly I probably won’t set up a VDI for my company or for customers in the near future and that’s why I won’t get educated for it. The only thing which I can do is reading through the documentations and setting up View in my home environment… and so here’s my chance to get a real good education which will help me advance in my IT career and also increase my VMware knowledge; I’m allready a VCP and I also want to head for the VCA-DT or even VCP-DT. I know that Trainsignal provides fantastic trainings and I would be great if I could get the free copy of the View Essentials Course Btw. from time to time I’m hearing voices in my company about how nice it would be to just work from everywhere without having to struggle with a bad server connection or slow VPN; wouldn’t it be great if I could show them how easy and fast it would be to work with a Virtual Desktop on View?

Mike Catlett

I recently moved to a small town in rural Nebraska and started work for a medium size company. Last week we got approval to switch over to an HP blade environment and migrate all of our servers over to virtualization on VMWare. I need to make a case to my upper ups of why we need Enterprise edition over standard edition and my VMware experience is lacking. I am also the primary responsible person for the entire virtualized environment, … ok your right all of that is BS the real reason I need this… without proper training I could lose my job, and if I lose my job i might have to learn to pit fight, and if i learn to pit fight I might break a toe, and if I break a toe I wont be able to training for my Olympic dream of being the worlds fastest man. So you see without training this would crush all my dreams and leave me a pathetic broken shell of a geek….Don’t kill my dreams ….

I’ll be sending out an email so I can get your shipping address and will get your prizes on their way. Congrats again, and thanks to everyone who submitted an entry, keep on reading, there are more prizes to be won. If you didn’t win, head over to Train Signal and buy the course, it’s well worth the investment you make in it.

Top 5 Blog Posts of the Week
These posts are from the week ending 02/10/2012
Kendrick Coleman – My Small VMware Certification Rant
Today I went and took my VCP5 certification exam and passed. Thanks to all my fellow twitterati for the resounding congratulations. While VCP5 is still a great certification to have and I’m happy that I passed, I honestly didn’t want to take the test. Here’s why…

Tomi Hakala – Paravirtual adapters with VMware Workstation
Did you know that you can use paravirtual VMXNET3 and PVSCSI adapters with VMs running on VMware Workstation? Paravirtual adapters will improve networking and disk IO performance by using valuable CPU cycles more efficiently. Paravirtual adapters are not available through VMware Workstation GUI but you can enable them by tweaking Virtual Machine’s VMX configuration file with…

Chris Wahl – Tips For Getting Started With PowerCLI
A number of folks I speak with are aware of PowerCLI (and subsequently, PowerShell) and that it has some sort of magic mojo to do whatever the imagination can come up with. Which is true (mostly). The fine folks at VMware and the rockstars of scripting (mentioned later in this post) have pretty much taken PowerCLI to the point where the next version will become sentient and…

Frank Denneman – Storage DRS I/O Load Balancing and Array-Based Auto-Tiering
In its basic form Storage DRS can be used together with any array, however there are a few combinations of Storage array features and Storage DRS features that don’t mix easily. One of the most sought after question is can Storage DRS work with Array based Auto-tiering? And the answer is yes, yes you can use initial placement and out of space avoidance features that Storage…

William Lam – Automating vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) Configurations
I recently had a need to deploy half a dozen or so vCenter Server Appliance (VCSA) in my home lab and even though it is one of the easiest appliances to setup, going through the web management interface can still be time consuming. I was looking to see if there was a way to automate some of the configurations and while digging in…

Bonus Post
Brooke Crothers – How the two flavors of Windows 8 will be different
One thing was made crystal clear today by Microsoft. Windows 8 on ARM will not be the same experience as Windows 8 on Intel-AMD. Windows 8 ARM devices will run on processors from Texas Instruments, Qualcomm, and Nvidia–marking the first time that a mainstream Windows operating system will run on processors from ARM chip suppliers in addition to those of Intel-AMD…

Brian Knudtson
vExpert, Quadruple VCP, VCA-Desktop, VCP-Desktop, VCAP-DCA, VCAP-DCD

Lane Leverett
VCDX 3 and 4 (VCDX #53), VCAP4-DCD, VCA4-DT , VCP4-DT, VCP3 and 4, MCSE NT4/2000/2003, CCNA, DCUCD, DCUCI

That kind of experience in an instructor is priceless. Another nice thing about all of the Train Signal instructors is that they are able to relay real-world experience along with their teaching. Reading a book about VMware View is one thing, hearing about real-world experience gives the student a much better opportunity to learn about View 5 and apply that knowledge to their environments. Here is what you can plan on learning with Train Signal’s VMware View 5 Essentials Training from their website:

VMware View 5 Essentials is for IT pros that need to get a View environment up and running. VMware View is one of the world’s most-used virtualization solutions, due in part to the fact that such a VDI can greatly reduce costs of end-user desktops. This course covers View components, installation, configuration and more.

Can’t Afford IT Training?… read on
Yes, we all know how expensive IT training is, to be honest there have been many training courses I’ve had to pass on simply due to the enormous cost. Take for example a large classroom training company which offers VMware View training; they have to cover the cost of the building upkeep, overhead of employee salary and benefits, materials, lab space, there’s a lot of money wrapped up in overhead. You can expect to pay around $3000 for a course offered by a company such as this. Train Signal brings the course to you. There’s no overhead of having to provide space for 60 students in a classroom along with all of the computer equipment for each student. You can have the training on demand, do it at your learning pace. Incredibly, Train Signal is offering this course at $397 dollars delivered to your door step at no additional charge.

Get A Free Copy From vDestination
CONTEST IS CLOSED, THANKS FOR ENTERING
Thanks to my good friends at Train Signal I have 2 copies of VMware View 5 Essentials training to give away free of charge. Here’s how you can win a copy. Leave a comment on this blog post pleading your case for a free copy of VMware View 5 Essentials from Train Signal, together with Train Signal we will decide on who makes the best case. Humor is welcome, begging is a plus… convince us how bad you want this training. Since I have two copies we’ll select the top two comments to receive the training. You must leave your first and last name, email address and your comment on this blog post, only one entry please. Contest is open now, and will close on Wednesday February 8th at 9pm EST. Good luck!

*You can pick 10 of your favorite blogs and also rank them in your order of preference after you pick your 10. The results will be weighted with #1 ranking getting 10 points and #10 rankings getting 1 point. Point totals will be tabulated and from them the top 50 will be determined.
*Blogs are listed on the ballot in alphabetical order with the current top 25 blogs highlighted in bold & underlined text, so please go through the whole list when making your choices (Duncan ended up on the bottom).
*New this year we also having voting in special categories to help distinguish certain types of blogs. The choices of which blogs to include in the categories was the result of this survey and my best guessing. The categories are independent of the general voting so first pick and rank your top 10 overall favorite blogs and then choose your favorite blog in each category.
*Voting will run until 2/7, afterwards the results will be determined and announced on a special podcast with myself, Simon Seagrave, David Davis and John Troyer live at VMware Partner Exchange.

If you have enjoyed reading my blog this past year and find my content useful, please take a few minutes to vote for vDestination.com, I would appreciate it. I blog because I want to give back to the virtualization community and to share any news or experiences I have working with VMware products. I also have enjoyed doing book reviews and product reviews hoping to help my readers to make an informed decision when they are looking to buy. Thanks for reading and remember to vote!

Greg Stuart: Welcome to this edition of The Virtual Boardroom, joining me today is Oded Kedem, CTO and co-founder of Zerto. Why don’t we start off with you introducing yourself and tell us what you do for Zerto.

Oded Kedem: Ok, thanks Greg. I’m Oded Kedem, CTO and co-founder of Zerto. Zerto has been around sine late 2009. Before Zerto I worked for a company called Kashya which provided disaster recovery solutions for SANs, so I’ve been doing business continuity for a while now. When Kashya was acquired by EMC in 2006 I then served as director of software development for EMC, where I managed the entire RecoverPoint (formerly Kashya) research and development organization.

GS: Great, thanks. Tell me about Zerto. What should my readers know about your company? What does Zerto bring to the virtualization industry and why should we take notice?

OK: Zerto provides a new approach for disaster recovery and business continuity for virtualized environments and cloud environments. Zerto provides a new concept called hypervisor based replication, that means that it’s able to provide tier 1 enterprise class business continuity.

GS: At this point in time, who are you supporting, and who do you look to support in the future?

OK: Right now, Zerto supports VMware environments. Our product went GA this past August and it supports VMware virtualized environments. We plan on releasing our cloud offering sometime Q1 of this year. This product will enable cloud providers to provide disaster recovery as a service to their customer, and will allow them to protect their own internal infrastructure using Zerto.

GS: Ok, so what differentiates you from other disaster recovery companies out there today?

OK: This point in time the only company that provides enterprise replication are the storage array vendors, but the storage array vendors solutions are provided from outside the virtualization infrastructure. This means they are lacking the flexibility of using a virtualized environment. In addition they are also tied to physical infrastructure. With Zerto customers are able to protect and replicate virtualized entities or virtual machines and virtual applications which consists of several virtual machines. They can reside on any hardware, on different servers, different storage arrays and then can move around storage arrays. Zerto can replicate them at the highest level of protection with full flexibility of virtualization and actually allow customers to maximize their virtualization benefits and still get the tier 1 protection. Obviously it will also allow customers to manager their entire environment, business continuity, disaster recovery all from the same location, from vCenter.

GS: Very good. So this is a many-to-many set up?

OK: This is a many-to-many set up as well as an any-to-any set up. You can have any number of storage arrays in any type of host or any type of storage array. It completely detaches business continuity and disaster recovery services from physical constraints. You are able to replicate virtual machines and virtual applications rather than physical disks or physical servers.

GS: Let’s talk a little bit about the future of Zerto. What does the future hold for Zerto?

OK: This point in time virtualization of the datacenter is already in tact but we’re seeing everything moving toward the cloud. We’re seeing cloud providers building their infrastructures providing services for their customers moving more and more enterprise applications into the cloud. With Zerto, Cloud providers will be able to provide disaster recovery as a service just like any other service they provide. They’ll be able to protect their own environment. Also expect to see more variants in larger variety of products out there, more storage array vendors, more server environments. Also additional virtualization solutions and additional cloud management solutions picking up. In these extremely heterogeneous environment a solution like Zerto is actually a must. It is the only way to protect without using a large number of separate solutions. You are able to manager your entire disaster recovery from the same place although your environment becomes much more complex.

GS: You bring up some very valid points. I think we will see more virtualization solutions as well as more competition from the vendors on the scene already. I have to agree with you, at this point it seems the future is all cloud. We will see a lot of cloud service providers cropping up throughout this year and beyond. Thanks Oded, for joining me today, again I know its past midnight for you and I appreciate you staying up to do this interview. Zerto seems to be on the right path and we’ll look forward to seeing more from Zerto in the near future.

OK: Thanks Greg, for having me on for the interview. It was my pleasure.

*Playstation Network was hacked and 77 million user accounts were compromised

*Central Intelligence Agency’s (CIA) website was hacked taking control of site’s accessibility

*PBS.org website was hacked taking control of internal hosts and databases

These attacks and others have cost companies loss of revenue and has hurt the consumer’s wallets as well. So, what is the ironclad approach to securing our personal data? Unfortunately, there is no ironclad approach. There are however, some simple ways that we can protect our data that will keep up from losing all that we have. The majority of us are not CEOs or Executive Vice Presidents, but our data is still important to us and we should treat it as such. With the growth and popularity of Cloud computing, we have the opportunity to create a multi-layered approach to securing our data. Here are 3 small steps you can take this year to secure and back up your data in the Cloud.

Read the full article at Petri.co.il.