2012-01-24

‘Tis the Season to be Voting …..

It seems like only yesterday when the last survey was conducted, and I was actually not going to write this post – because I hate “me too” posts.

So let us try and do this slightly differently.

On my No. 32 - Thank you all so much! post I stated some observations – which I hope you will consider this year, when you choose which blogs you wish to rank in the top 10.

Try not to make this into a popularity contest.
Judge the bloggers on their content.
Judge the bloggers on their writing skills.
Judge the bloggers on their passion.
Judge the bloggers on who they are – not just because they work in company A, B or C.

It is great that there are some changes in this year’s survey:

Bloggers for certain categories:
Storage blog
Cloud Computing blog
End User Computing (VDI) blog
News & Information website
Favorite Scripting blog
Favorite Podcast
Official VMware blog
Best Videos used in a blog
Favorite New Blog (less than a year old)
Favorite Independent blogger

If you find that my blog or my writing deserves your vote or it fits any of the above mentioned categories,
I would be most thankful.

Good luck to all the bloggers!!

Vote Now

As always – once the results are published you can follow the Top 25 Bloggers on Twitter.

2012-01-23

InventorySnapshot Fling Updated

Personally I think this is one of the most useful Fling's I have come across.

For those of you who do not know what a fling is…

A fling is a short-term thing, not a serious relationship but a fun one. Likewise, the tools that are offered here are intended to be played with and explored.

Four days ago the InventorySnapshot Fling was updated to version 1.1

From the release notes:

Updates in Version 1.1

These release notes are intended to supplement and super-cede the documentation in this fling.This release introduces three new features.

1. Template restoration. We have added snapshot and restore of VM templates. In other words, if you have templates in your hierarchy, when you snapshot and then restore the inventory, the templates should be re-registered properly. Prior to this release, we did not archive template information.

2. Command-line snapshot. You can now initiate InventorySnapshot from the command line using cmdLineSnapshot.bat or cmdLineSnapshot.sh. This will snapshot the inventory from the command line, but it will use dummy passwords for the ESX hosts. In order to edit the passwords for the ESX hosts, you will need to use the readFromSnapshot.bat (or readFromSnapshot.sh) UI. When you click on this script, a UI will come up that will ask you to specify the directory where the snapshot has been stored. You type in the name of the directory and click on 'Read from snapshot directory.' The UI will then load the snapshot, allowing you to modify host passwords, etc. You can also use the 'Browse for snapshot directory' to find the snapshot directory using the file browser.

3. Non-unique folder names. In the past, we required all entities (folders, VMs, RPs, etc.) to have unique names. We have now relaxed this restriction for VM and host folders. You can now have the following hierarchy:

Root
|
->Production A Folder
| |
| -->Production Folder
| |
| -->Host A1
|
->Production B Folder
  |
  -->Production Folder
     |
     -->Host B1

Note that the folder name "Production Folder" is repeated. This works for hosts and VMs. It should also work with datastores and networks, though those have not been as extensively tested.

Below is the original Video  released by the developers Ravi Soundararajan and Balaji Parimi

Flings are great tools - albeit not officially supported.

Something tells me we are going to get some new ones soon….

There is an RSS feed that you can subscribe to for new updates. I for one have update by bookmarks..

2012-01-19

System Center 2012 Resources – Say How Much?

**Of course this is not a GA product (yet). Hyper-V 3.0 is not GA (yet). So this is all theoretical and in the future.**

Microsoft is about to starting to push their Private Cloud offering.

The first thing I always look at is what are the components involved.

From the Download Microsoft Private Cloud Evaluation Software page :

  • System Center 2012 App Controller provides a common self-service experience across private and public clouds that can help you empower application owners to easily build, configure, deploy, and manage new services.
    System Requirements >>
  • System Center 2012 Configuration Manager provides comprehensive configuration management for the Microsoft platform that can help you empower users with the devices and applications they need to be productive while maintaining corporate compliance and control.
    System Requirements >>
  • System Center 2012 Data Protection Manager provides unified data protection for Windows servers and clients that can help you deliver scalable, manageable, and cost-effective protection and restore scenarios from disk, tape, and off premise.
    System Requirements >>
  • System Center 2012 Endpoint Protection, built on System Center Configuration Manager, provides industry-leading threat detection of malware and exploits as part of a unified infrastructure for managing client security and compliance that can help you simplify and improve endpoint protection.
    System Requirements >>
  • System Center 2012 Operations Manager provides deep application diagnostics and infrastructure monitoring that can help you ensure the predictable performance and availability of vital applications and offers a comprehensive view of your datacenter, private, and public clouds.
    System Requirements >>
  • System Center 2012 Orchestrator provides orchestration, integration, and automation of IT processes through the creation of runbooks that can help you to define and standardize best practices and improve operational efficiency.
    System Requirements >>
  • System Center 2012 Service Manager provides flexible self-service experiences and standardized datacenter processes that can help you integrate people, workflows, and knowledge across enterprise infrastructure and applications.
    System Requirements >>
  • System Center 2012 Virtual Machine Manager provides virtual machine management and services deployment with support for multi-hypervisor environments that can help you deliver a flexible and cost effective private cloud environment.
    System Requirements >>

Man - that is a lot of components.

I then went to look at the system requirements (CPU/RAM only) - I only took the recommended values

Totals

I would like to say two things regarding this list.

  1. I probably grossly miscalculated - and I am 100% sure that you can consolidate some of these components onto one machine - but for the sake of the argument - let us say they are all separate instances.
  2. Are you kidding me???? Do you know how many components that involves? And this is supposed to be "simple" ??

I would like to stress - this is not a price comparison of who is cheaper / better / more handsome. I just took into what are the resources needed to run such a solution.

One last thing. the offering is licensed in two editions Standard / Datacenter.

Licensing FAQ

Tell me someone in their right mind who would only by this for 2 VM's. Which means you go for the Datacenter license - and ahem .. did I mention you need to have and Enterprise Agreement (EA) with Microsoft to be able to use this?

**On a personal note - If people thought that VMware licensing was complicated - just try and understand this document above.**

I actually would like to compare this to the requirements needed for a vCloud solution - it would be interesting to see, if I have forgotten any components below that would provide a parallel solution as the one above please feel free to let me know.

  • vCenter
  • vCenter Database Server
  • vCenter Update Manager
  • vCenter Update Manager Database Server
  • vCloud
  • vCloud Database Server
  • vCloud Connector
  • vShield Manager
  • Orchestrator
  • AutoDeploy
  • vCOPS Enterprise
  • vCenter Configurations Manager
  • Site Recovery Manager
  • Service Manager
  • vFabric Application Performance Manager

Your Feedback is welcome (and let the flaming begin!)

2012-01-17

VMjuggler–the #PowerCLI version

I was tasked with testing the throughput of the vMotion network between two hosts - to see how much of the throughput was / could be used. Now I remembered that there was an application that someone had wrote to simulate vMotions between hosts - so I put the question out to Twitter

The answers I got from @joerglew and @boukeg pointed me to VMJuggler written by Richard Garsthagen Juggler

But this was an MSI file and had to be installed as an application - so I said to myself - there has to be another way to do this.

So I wrote a small PowerCLI VMjuggler (the name and credits go all to Richard)
The basic functionality in the MSI was:

  1. Choose source Host
  2. Choose Destination Host
  3. Choose VM
  4. Display counter of the number of vMotions that have taken place



###########################################################################
#
# NAME: VMjuggler.ps1
#
# AUTHOR:  Maish Saidel-Keesing
#
# COMMENT: Based on the exe file from http://www.run-virtual.com/?dl_id=8
# This will move a vm between two hosts an endless loop until the script is stopped
# It will display a counter of how many vmotions have been performed.
# VERSION HISTORY:
# 1.0 15/01/2012 - Initial release
#
###########################################################################

$hostA = Read-Host "Please enter the name of Host A"
$hostB = Read-Host "Please enter the name of Host B"
$vmname = Read-Host "Please enter the name of VM"

$x = 0
While ($true) {
Move-VM -VM $vmname -Destination $HostA | Out-Null
$hostA,$hostB =$hostB,$hostA
$x++
$x
}

Annotations:
Lines 15-17 - Accept input to populate variables
Lines 19-21 - In an endless loop move the VM between hosts
Line 22 - I would like to thank Shay Levy for explaining to me how to switch the variables. The destination for the migration is always $hostA but each time the VM moves hosts - the destination must also change and this is the method to swap the values in the variables. A detailed explanation can be found here - http://tfl09.blogspot.com/2009/02/swapping-variables-with-powershell.html
Lines 23-24 - display the counter

Below is a Demonstration video of the script.

VMjuggler demonstration

Hope you can make use of this.