Lots of buzz in the VMware Space

May 3rd, 2012 by Justin No comments »

Yesterday VMware publicly announced two projects that they have been working on, so I figured I would share some details on those projects that were mentioned in the presentation.

First up is VMware Horizon, while it’s not new, they are getting ready for the release of version 1.5. In the previous release Horizon was sold as SaaS and it was not hosted at your datacenter. Version 1.5 will change this and you will be able to deploy a virtual appliance and keep it in house. If your like me you probably havent given VMware Horizon much of a look… In my case because I couldnt deploy the appliance and try it out… the SaaS approach probably kept the eyes of many off this project.

I am pretty excited to see it as an applaince though, and do look forward to deploying it and running it through its pases and will also be sure to post my review of it. Oh and in case you dont know what VMware Horizon is … I would compare it to Xenapp… but more of a next gen product. It allows any application to run on any device… and it presents the same interface on any of those devices… be it a phone, iPad, Droid, or PC/MAC. For more information check out this VMware Blog article: http://blogs.vmware.com/euc/2012/05/vmware-horizon-application-manager-15.html

The second project that I think you will want to keep your eyes on is Project Octopus. I am much more familure with this project as I have been a beta tester for quite some time. While I cant give away too much info yet (as its still under NDA I think), I can tell you about the product and show you where to sign up for the public beta.

Basically Project Octopus is Google Drive / DropBox / Box.net / blah blah blah. The difference? Its hosted on your cloud, it integrates with your existing infrastructure and most importantly it integrates (or will be anyhow) with other VMware products like Zimbra and Horizon. IF you would like to get your name in the hat for the public beta then head over to: http://www.vmwareoctopus.com/

VMware is alot like a Quentin Tarantino movie. Take vCloud Director for example, it is the culmination of many of their products… vShield for example plays a big role in vCloud Director, but by itself and when it was initially released… I thought who the heck would use this? Why wouldn’t I just leverage the investment I already have in my Cisco ASA’s or whatever… but then you find out they have vCloud Director up their sleve and its like AHHHH I get it now…. just like a Tarantino film.  I think we will see the same thing with VMware Horizon 1.5, we will see a culmination of features from VMware View, and Zimbra, and Project Octopus come together to deliver Desktop 3.0 (?) technology.

 

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The Missing Manual Part 2: Application Aware Backups

April 24th, 2012 by Justin No comments »

One thing that I don’t think is stressed enough in the Veeam manual is the “Application Aware” check box that is, by default, not checked. Because Veeam (like most other image level backup softwares) do not do a true system state backup like in the the old days, there can be some significant issues if you are restoring an Active Directory domain controller. However Veeam can compensate for this problem if the “Application Aware Image Processing” check box has been selected. If however you restore a domain controller from a backup and that box was not checked then you run the risk of FUBARing Active Directory replication.

For  more information on why the problem happens check out this Microsoft KB article http://support.microsoft.com/kb/875495

I’m no active directory expert, but I did get to witness what happens when you restore a DC without the Application Aware processing, and I must say that it is not a fun process to fix the problem. The best way to avoid having to deal with the problem is to just check the Application Aware Image processing box.

After you restore a system from a backup that did not have that box checked symptoms include:

  • Netlogon service is not running
  • Active Directory may not replication between servers
  • Event ID 2103 in Event Viewer. ( The Active directory database has been
    restored using an unsupported procedure.)

I would encourage you to go through your backup jobs and verify that this check box has been checked and that you have valid domain credentials in the proper boxes below it on the same window.

 

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vExpert 2012!

April 15th, 2012 by Justin 3 comments »

After seeing my email box blow up this morning with new posts on the vExpert board I thought I better have a look and see if I was on the list of 2012 vExperts.

Sure enough my name was there! So again I would like to thank John and Alex for all their hard work in making the vExpert program happen, without you guys we wouldnt get access to all the cool stuff we do!

I would also like to say congratulations and welcome to all the returning and new vExperts in 2012! Great work guys (and gals).

If you haven’t gotten an email yet, but did apply to be a vExpert check out this link as it has a list of the 2012 vExperts. http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2012/02/vexpert-2012-applications-now-open.html

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Findlay Lunch and Learn Presentation

March 21st, 2012 by Justin 5 comments »

As requested here is a copy of the Power Point that was presented at the Findlay Lunch and Learn Wednesday, March 21, 2012

Business Case for Virtualization

If anyone has any questions or would like to do a follow up chat, please let me know.

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Installing HP CIM drivers on ESXi 5.0

March 19th, 2012 by Justin 4 comments »

What is CIM?

CIM means Common Information Model, and they allow for communication between the ESXi Operating System and the hardware sensors.

Why do I need it?

Normally I am a big fan of using the HP ESXi ISO image to load servers with ESXi instead of the VMware roll if its being loaded on an HP server. The HP image is a derived from the VMware image, but they add in all the HP drivers and CIM drivers so that you don’t have to manually install them. You can always tell when an HP server has been loaded with the VMware image because under the “Hardware Status” tab there is no reference to storage devices. See Figure 1. (Click to zoom in)

Figure 1. Health Status before HP CIM drivers

Figure 2 shows the “Health Status” after the HP CIM driver install.

Figure 2 Health Status After CIM install

As you can see we now have detailed information about the Array controller and what it is doing. This is extremely important if you have local storage in the server, because without getting this information to vCenter, you wont be able to get email (or other) alerts if a driver were to fail.

There is one problem with the HP ESXi image though… it always a few days/weeks behind the official realease, and if you install a bunch of VMware servers like I do you may not be able to wait a week for it to come out. That is why sometimes we need to manually install the CIM providers on ESXi.

So how do we manually install?

In order to manually install the CIM providers we first need to download the zip file from HP’s website. In this example I am installing them on a DL360 G6 server so I went to its drivers page and looked for the following item.

Figure 3 The HP CIM providers can be downloaded from here

After downloading the drivers upload them to a datastore. If you are going to do multiple servers your best option would be to already have a SAN or NFS datastore shared among the hosts to upload to. After uploading you have two options, you can enable SSH on each of your hosts or you can use the vSphere CLI interface, I would let how many hosts I need to do determine which of these two methods I would use. Because I only had one host to update today I just enabled SSH and used the following command:

esxcli software vib install -d <datastore path><bundle.zip>

But if I were to use vSphere CLI I would have needed to use this command:

esxcli -s <server> -u root -p mypassword software vib install -d <datastore path><bundle.zip>

The advantage of using vSphere CLI is that you should only need to change the server name in the command for each host you want to do. After a successful install you will also need to reboot the host before the new CIM drivers will take affect.

Figure 4 Successful install output

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