vExperts 2012 announced

April 15th, 2012 Posted in Virtualization
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This morning while packing my stuff for a trip tomorrow, I came across the tweet that lead me to the announcement of the 2012 vExperts. It was a bit sneaky because I didn’t see it coming back this early, but hey it’s great! John, Alex and team did an awesome job for the fast turnaround.

Here is the announcement and here is the temp list of all vExperts 2012. This is a temp list because not all vExperts have been added to the list yet. So if you don’t see your name in there, don’t feel let down. It might get added soon.

Congrats to all new and returning vExperts, last year was great and seems like this year will be even better. Last year the total count for vExperts was 281, lets see how many more were added to the list. The more the merrier.

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Ops Manager does not show up under Assets in vSphere Client

April 12th, 2012 Posted in Virtualization
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Ok so I just went through some very painful hours and I hope nobody else has to ever go through this. Thats the reason fro this post. So I am sort of rearranging parts of my lab which really started the whole mess. I had to redeploy Operations Manager. Sounds pretty simple right? Read on..

Everything went great as far as registering Ops Mgr to my vCenter etc but then something odd really happened. I wasn’t able to apply the license for Ops Mgr. Keep in mind, you can only apply the license for Ops Mgr using the vSphere-Client under Home –>Administration –> Licensing, when there click on the “Asset” radio button and there you would see your unlicensed Ops Mgr waiting for your license key.

Only in my case, I saw both my hosts and the vCenter but no Ops Mgr. I tried everything under the sun from un-registering, re-registering but nothing really worked. I power cycled the vApp, restarted by vCenter service in hopes for it to start seeing things. Interestingly I could see “vCenter Operations Manager” in my home screen under “Solutions and Applications” but clicking it came back with a message saying you are not licensed you idiot. Well not quite but you know what I mean.

I was inches away from re-deploying the vApp when I figured well lets try one more thing. I looked around and noticed people had more luck with launching the vSphere client from the vCenter Server and that seem to have worked for a few folks. I figured well why not. So far I was accessing all this from the vSphere client installed on my laptop. So I logged into my vCenter (Mr. Hades) and launched the vSphere client there to see if that made a difference.


I was pleasantly surprised to see that this time around I did see Ops Mgr under Assets in licensing. Why did this work and the other didn’t? I have no clue but if I have to take a guess I would say it must have something to do with the vSphere client and not really Ops Mgr, but I am not sure. Now I did deploy Ops Mgr a few months ago and don’t recall having this issue before (I do have bad memory so its possible that I just forgot). But this is really for someone else out there who happens to see the same issue as I did, try accessing your vCenter from the vSphere client installed on the vCenter server itself and see if you have any luck.

From here onwards, you should be able to license your Ops Mgr and finally log in. For the record I am running vSphere 5 U1 and I am NOT running the vCSA. Getting the license applied in Ops Mgr is really important because basically you can’t really login to the Ops Mgr portal if its not licensed. If you are having the same issue as described above, hopefully you found this blog before you ruined your entire day like I did.

 

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Symantec and vExpert event in Mountain View, CA

April 10th, 2012 Posted in Virtualization
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A few days ago I got the opportunity to meet a few fellow vExperts in an event hosted by @Symantec at their headquarters in Mountain View, CA. @JordanPusey was awesome in getting all the travel arrangements setup (not to mention he also helped me when I missed my flight back).

The event was way more than what I expected it to be. I was thinking this may end up being a sales event but it turned out to be a million times better. Basically Symantec showed us a few of their upcoming and recently released products and the meeting was more like a round table conference on what we (vExperts) feel about the products and what can Symantec do to make it perfect. Talk about a company taking their products seriously. I was pleasantly surprised and impressed. And no, I am not saying this because Symantec paid me to say all this, they are not even the sponsors of my blog (all though I would not mind that, just saying). It’s very promising to know that a company this size is interested in meeting folks from the field who use their products and are interested in their input to come up with better solutions.

Among all the Symantec staff, some of whom I was able to find on twitter are, @JordanPusey,  @kmitchel,  @SymRenRPM, @dhuskiss (via phone), @AbdulRasheed127. These are all great people and there were many more there but like I said these are the only folks I was able to find on twitter. If you are interested in finding what Symantec has been up to, I suggest you follow these guys.

Now I am not exactly sure about the level of secrecy we are supposed to maintain from the discussions in the meeting.  So I will try and respect that and try to not give out more information than what I am supposed to. Some of the discussions were around Symantec’s security products and things like agent-less anti-virus kept coming up over and over. We got to see the awesome Net Backup overhaul that was quite impressive (new GUI as well but we didn’t get to see that). Ability to restore both file level and image level from a single backup thats made is always appreciated by the storage admins. Dynamic Multi-Pathing software that’s supported on over 1000 models that is both OS and storage system agnostic – really awesome due to its integration with vCenter. Oh did I mention the Net Backup vCenter integration as well? Yeah thats totally awesome as well. Lastly, there were also a small discussion about Application HA that I have personally never been too impressed with. But hey, its there.

This was a very small tiny summary of what went on between an awesome lunch and an incredible dinner. Now let’s get to the fun part. It was a total of 6 vExperts who were present in the meeting. I met all of them for the first time ever and they were all like any other vExpert; hard headed and had no clue of what they were talking about. Ok just kidding, as always it was a pleasure to meet the fellow vExperts and all of them were awesome that made the whole event totally worth it in spite of me missing my flight back. In fact I missed my flight because I stayed up really late talking to two of these great guys.

So who were the vExperts that were present? Here are their twitter handles followed by my personal opinion of them. The opinions are suppose to be a fun thing so please don’t take it personally. I know most vExperts have a thick skin but still…

@mpoore - a true gentleman from across the Atlantic

@vSential - brother from another mother, we had so much in common that it just got down right creepy

@virt_pimp - kickass jack of all trades from Idaho who loves his @TintriInc appliance (and why wouldn’t he). He also got me in touch with @Wyse_Lytle from Wyse. Did I ever mention how important it is to have contacts :D

@zsoldier who does it all. Engages in an intense discussion, while he is responding to comments on VMTN followed by a workout when the rest us are just relaxing.

@coolsport00 Well dressed and means business, has a sophisticated sense of humor. Glad that I finally got to meet him after missing out on the opportunity in Vegas last year.

And lastly it was me. All in all we had an awesome time, got to meet some awesome people and had an opportunity to see some fabulous stuff Symantec has been and will be working on.

 

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