Vote for sessions at VMworld 2013

April 23rd, 2013 Posted in Virtualization
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As you may already know, the VMworld sessions are a result of a rigorous process that starts very early. Before a session is added, its approved, opened for public voting and after going through several processes it becomes part of VMworld. This year I am fortunate enough to have been submitted for two sessions at VMworld. The sessions are now open for public voting and I will appreciate your vote in getting my sessions approved and having the opportunity to speak at VMworld.

You can go to VMworld’s website and cast your vote. The public voting opened earlier today. Once there, simply filter the sessions and type in the session IDs provided below in the keyword fields. That should speed up things. However, its always a good idea to look for other sessions that may interest you. The important thing is for you to cast your vote. Of course, if that vote is for one of my sessions thats even better. You will need a VMworld ID in order to vote. You can also enter my name “bilal hashmi” in the keywords field to display both sessions like the screenshot below. From here onwards, its a matter of simply clicking the thumbs up. If its green like mine that means you voted. Yes, I voted for myself :D

My sessions:

vCenter: The Unsung Hero (Protecting the Core) – Session ID 4873

This session will be regarding the challenges we face with vCenter in 2013. This will cover topics like the importance of keeping vCenter up at all times. With new dependancies in the stack that rely heavily on vCenter to be available at all times, it has become challenging to keep all peices of vCenter running at all times. As we all know we now have more moving parts in vCenter. This session will cover the gotachs, and how you can secure your vCenter in order to keep the dependent services up at all times. I will be co-presenting this with a fellow vExpert James Bowling @vSential. Please vote for this session 4873.

Reports, Mashups and Analytics for your Datacenter – Session ID 5852

The other session is among my favorite topics to talk about. And what better place to talk about it than VMworld. Its the topic of reporting and analytics for your datacenter. We have found ourselves busy with a variety of different techniques to retrive the all importnat reports. Some of us get to use expensive tools that simply dont deliver or are too complicated to use. We also have the brave ones among us who would put powerCLI to work, and of course the good ole excel spreadsheets are never too far from a reporting discusion. We will be going over a different approach on retrieving critical information across your environment. This is not the one to miss. We will be unveiling some new capabilities of CloudPhysics for reports, mashups and analytics for your Datacenter. I plan to co-present this with another fellow vExpert Anthony Spiteri @anthonyspiteri. Please vote for this session 5852.

Obviously there are other great sessions that one should probably vote for as well. My suggestions are below. I think these are all great topics and would definitely be great addition to the VMworld this year. Good luck and I hope to see you all later this year.

5852 Reports, Mashups and Analytics for your Datacenter Bilal Hashmi, Verizon Business

Anthony Spiteri, Anittel
4873 vCenter: The Unsung Hero (Protecting the Core)  James Bowling, iland

Bilal Hashmi, Verizon Business
5778 Solid State of Affairs: The Benefits and Challenges of SSDs in… Steve Vu, ESRI

Irfan Ahmad, CloudPhysics
5818 How I maximized my vCloud ROI with vSphere Clustering Parag Mehta, Equinix

Jorge Pazos, City of Melrose
5854 Software Defined Data Centers  - Big Data Problem or Opportunity? Ariel Antigua, Universidad APEC

Bob Plankers, Univ of Wisconsin
5900 Flight Simulator for the VMware Software Defined Datacenter Michael Ryom, Statens It, Denmark

Maish Saidel-Keesing, Cisco
5892 The Decisive Admin:  How to make better choices operating and designing vSphere infrastructure John Blumenthal, CloudPhysics

Drew Henning, HDR Inc.
5859 Storage and CPU Noisy Neighbor Issues: Troubleshooting and Best Practices Krishna Raja, CloudPhysics

Maish Saidel-Keesing, Cisco
5823 You are not alone: community intelligence in a software defined future vSphere infrastructure Panel:Trevor Pott, eGeek Consulting

Bob Plankers, Univ of Wisconsin

Josh Folland (Moderator)
4872 Operating and Architecting a vMSC based infrastructure Duncan Epping, VMware

Lee Dilworth, VMware
4570 Ask the Expert VCDX’s Panel:Rick Scherer, EMC

Matt Cowger, EMC

Chris Colotti, VMware

Duncan Epping, VMware

Jason Nash, Varrow

 

 

  

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More training than you can ask for

March 13th, 2013 Posted in Miscellaneous, Virtualization
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Most of you must already be aware of what Trainsignal is. They have come up with all kinds of training videos in the past few years that have covered not just VMware topics, but topics around other competing and even complimenting technologies. This covers, Citrix, Microsoft Cisco to name a few.

It’s one thing to have a long list of training video’s but Trainsignal has really put out some top quality material. Only now they have made all this very very affordable. For only $49/month or if you prefer anual subscription thats only $468/year for all the training videos they offer. What are those courses? Here is a list.

Of course, you can stream all their videos online which I have been able to do in the past with no hiccups on my laptop and even my ipad. What they also have is offline viewing where you may download a video and view it offline like on a long flight perhaps. The only catch is for now the offline viewing is limited to windows and OS X platform only due to the silverlight dependency. Hopefully that functionality will come to mobile devices soon. Go ahead and sign up for more training than you will ever find the time for.

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CloudHook will hook you up – PHD Virtual 6.2

March 7th, 2013 Posted in Virtualization
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A few months ago I reviewed the backup tool from PHD Virtual for VMware. Yes, I specifically mentioned VMware because they have one for Citrix also. The company is on the verge of releasing their next major update 6.2 and I got an opportunity to do a sneak peak.

Last year I was completely new to PHD Virtual and had figure out all the moving parts, which weren’t many to be honest. The post from my last review is here. The one thing I loved about the product was its simplicity where I really didn’t have to sit down and figure out what was needed in order for it to work. I just followed the screen instruction and taadaaa!.. it worked.  So, I have huge expectations this year and won’t be going into the details of how to setup and install.

Install:

The overall procedure to do the install is still pretty much the same. You are working with two pieces here.

  1. VBA (appliance)
  2. Console (windows installer)

In order to get the backup tool going, you will install the console on a windows machine and deploy the VBA appliance. From that point some initial configurations are needed and you are all set to go. Configuration like the IP address for the VBA, storage to be used for backup, email notification, retention polices, write space etc.. What is write space? Good question, hold your horses.

You will also create your backup jobs here and kick off a manual or schedule a backup job.  All of this is pretty basic and I don’t plan on going into the details of how to complete these tasks. Once you have the VBA deployed, you will realize you don’t need anyone to blog about the how to steps. And if you really need that, click on the “question mark” on the top right of the console window and you will have access to all the help you will ever need. 

 

The documentation is embedded within the console and its pretty good and detailed. Read the rest of this entry »

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Moving some vDatabases

February 20th, 2013 Posted in Virtualization
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So at some point you will find yourself doing this. And most of us may have already done at least some of these tasks at least once already. Moving the databases of our all important applications. This is obviously not a complete list, I plan on adding more to the list as I come across more ‘stuff’. Hopefully this will come in handy when you are asked to produce a SOP for helping decommission your old DB servers. This will be extremely helpful if that request comes in on a Monday morning when you are coming back from a long vacation.

Obviously if its not already mentioned in the links below, dont forget to update your ODBC DSN (DataSource Name) settings if your application is using one (example vCenter, VUM etc). The links cover mostly what to do on the application side before/after moving the databases. Not so much on how to perform the data migration. You can rely on your DBAs for that.

Move vCenter Database

Move SSO Database

Move vCloud Database

Though I have never done this, my gut tells me that view composer DB move requires an ODBC update. I am looking for both the composer and event DB migration instructions to add to the list above. If anyone already has a link please share that with me.

As always, be sure to look at the versions in the links and the version you are working with in order to produce the desired results.

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vCartoon of the Week (01/31/2013)

January 31st, 2013 Posted in vCartoon
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When SSO goes bye bye, things get interesting

January 29th, 2013 Posted in Virtualization
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So until today I was under the impression that SSO only effects the web-client in 5.1. The way I understood was the vSphere client still behaves the way it did before and SSO is not engaged unless the web-client is used to login. This also brought me to the conclusion that if SSO goes down, one cannot login via the web-client but the vSphere client can still be used. Wrong!!

A colleague of mine pointed me to a this page that clearly states the following:

How does SSO integrate with the vSphere Client?

SSO does not integrate with the vSphere Client. However, when you log in through the vSphere Client, vCenter Server sends the authentication request to SSO.

Once I read that I started doubting my thought process and the importance of SSO in 5.1 Apparently all access to vCenter must be down once SSO is down (both via web and vSphere client).

After doing a lot testing this is what I found (vcenter 5.1 build 799731). When SSO is down,

  • access via web-client is down as expected 
  • access via vSphere client is flakey

What does flakey access mean? Well, I got mixed results and was finally able to see some pattern. When SSO service is down, I was able to login with the account that has had a successful login while SSO was running. The important thing here was, “use windows session credentials” had to be checked for which I had to be logged in with the account that had successfully logged in when SSO was up. If I didnt check the box and entered the credentials myself, it told me the username and pwd were incorrect. I know I can fat finger keys at times but I tested this over and over to come to this conclusion. It wasnt me. Access was only allowed when the check box was checked.

This also meant any new account that was created or granted access couldn’t login using the vSphere client. Rememeber we only had luck with accounts that were able to login succssfuly prior to SSO service going down. And that too required the checkbox to be checked. If the account was just created or granted access after SSO went down, the screen showed the beautiful message on the right. The same message was received if the account didn’t successfully login while SSO was up. Why cant this message say the SSO cannot be reached is beyond me. By the way the web-client will tell you “Failed to communicate with the vCenter Single Sign On server” when SSO is down. So thank you VMware for doing that. 

Another thing to keep in mind. When SSO service is down, your vCenter service continues to run. However, if you attempt to restart your vCenter service you will find yourself in trouble. I was unable to get the vCenter service to start with SSO being offline. Which makes SSO even more important. Yes even with vCenter down your VMs continue to work but there are other vCenter specific features that will not function like DRS, sDRS for example. And if this vCenter is connected to a vCloud instance thats another can of worms.

So the bottom line is, SSO is very very important. It has two parts, the application and the DB part. VMware has done a great job in giving the option to install SSO as single, clustered or even multi-site type deployments. The high availability in the application side is thought out there. However, the problem is DB. VMware does not fully support SSO DB on a SQL cluster. As a matter of fact, there have been known issues that have come about when trying to deploy SSO using a SQL cluster. So the real option with full support is a stand alone SQL node. But that also creates a single point of failure. When the DB goes down, you are unable to login using the web-client, you maybe able to login using the vSphere client and all other things we discussed above.

So building redundancy is extremely important. VMware’s recommended solution is to use vCenter Heartbeat. We all know that can be a pricey solution. However, if full support along with redundancy is importnat to you, that is the way to go. I hope VMware extends their full support to at least allow running DB on a SQL cluster for all their products including vCenter (which is still a grey area). That would be the right thing to do. Heartbeat provides added functionality and there will always be a market for that as well. I hope full support on DB residing on SQL clusters is not further delayed in the interest of the vCenter Heartbeat product.

In the end I will borrow Tom Petty’s words to tell VMware “Don’t do me like that”…

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