Throughout your career things seem to ebb and flow, with hills and valleys along the way. For me 2011 so far has been a fast winding downhill road. Normally people look at the downhill as the bad part and that you want to be at the top of the mountain, but since the beginning of the summer when I got the new Motorcycle I have learned to appreciate the long winding curves of a downhill road, knowing that the next challenge and uphill is around the turn waiting for me. Sounds like a great epiphany right… So what brought this on? Continue reading
Category Archives: VMware
VMware is raising the bar
On July 12, 2011, VMware CEO Paul Maritz and CTO Steve Herrod will be presenting on the next generation of cloud infrastructure. The webcast titled “Raising the Bar, Part V” has made many believe this will just be a fancy way to introduce the next generation of hypervisor with the release of vSphere 5, however if rumors hold true there could be quite a few more releases also with three breakout deep dives you can only guess.
9:00-9:45 Paul and Steve present – live online streaming
10:00-12:00 three tracks of deep dive breakout sessions
10:00-12:00 live Q&A with VMware cloud and virtualization experts
The event is free — if you sign up today you’ll get an email reminder. If you can’t make the whole event make sure you follow @ConvergenceTech or @mletschin on twitter since we will be following along. A few of my fellow vExperts will also be onsite for the event and will be taking questions during and after the event with the #vmwarecloud hashtag.
On Wednesday, we’ll be recapping the event on ourVMware Community Roundtable — join some of the VMware staff, myself, many of the vExperts and others for an hour of live Q&A.
If you want to talk about it live you can also join a group of virtualization professionals for a networking gathering at the DC vBeers event.
VMware comes around to supporting multiple vCenters
VMware released a new fling today Boomerang. Boomerang allows for simple management of multiple ESX or vCenter servers simultaneously. A great resource when you don’t have linked vcenters or are a consulting or engineer working in a large shop. You can not have all your vcenters in one place with them even collapsing to a hyperlink when they get too big. This is still Windows only though so no luck for the Mac and Linux guys. This sounds great but where’s the catch… You can only do basic power operations so far. If you want to get to vMotion, High Availability, storage configuration, host provisioning cloning, templates, monitoring, or alerts you need to go to vCenter direct. The good news though is you can use the remote console. Continue reading
New Guy entering the ranks of vExpert
I was honored to wake up this morning with an email from John Troyer (@jtroyer) and the VMware Team.
Dear Michael Letschin,
We’re pleased to designate you as a vExpert 2011 as recognition of your contributions to the VMware, virtualization, and cloud computing communities. You’ve done work above and beyond, and we’re delighted to communicate more closely, to share resources, and to offer other opportunities for greater interaction throughout the year as we continue to grow knowledge and success in the community of IT professionals. Welcome to the vExpert 2011 Program!
I have been working in IT for a long time and to this day it is still really weird to get any email or comment referring to me as an “expert.” I am definitely honored and hope to continue to live up to the bar that has been set by previous vExperts. Great to join the group and looking forward to what comes from it.
How to Add your Twitter Name to your VMworld Registration
My company has a central point register employees for conferences so the same was true for VMworld. But I noticed that my twitter handle was not included and could not figure out exactly how to add it. After some searching and an email to VMWorld2011Registration@vmware-events.com I was able to figure it out. To save you all a little hassle, here’s a quick screenshot walk through that should help.
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Go to http://www.vmworld.com and sign in
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Enter whatever your VMworld.com username and password is
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Click Register Now (I know you already did but this is how it works)
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Select Your Conference Site then Click Submit
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Click on Registration
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Click on the Pencil Beside Contact Information
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Scroll to the bottom and just above Emergency Contact Information you will see a Twitter Username Space. Enter your username including the “@”. If you leave off the @ it will not be on your badge.
- Click Continue and you will be taken back to the Registration Information Screen.
All Done. Hope that helps everyone out. Please feel free to pass it along. Social Networking does not do much good if we aren’t social.
Brownbag Webinar on Storage Impact on VDI
How vCenter Operations kept my Tier 1 app virtual
Virtualization admins have become the last line of defense when something is not working right. Networking teams will claim it is the over use of hardware, developers will claim it is the hardware, storage guys claim that they just provide disk. So how can a virtualization admin clearly show the relationships between different systems, different hosts, and the needs for CPU, Memory, network and storage. The answers to all the questions already sit in the logs and data collected by vCenter, but without an easy way to interpret the data it is pointless. In comes vCenter Operations.
vCenter Operations is a natural way for virtualization administrators enter into a full scope virtualization monitoring platform. As an integrator, we have found that each time we place a new or upgraded vSphere environment, we have added Operation Standard to the kit to allow the admins on site to get a great overview of their environment as shown below.
You will notice that you can see vCenter systems, datacenters, clusters, and even all the way down to an individual VM. The next questions is how did this help us with a Tier one app.
I was recently at a client site that was having some significant speed issues in their Sharepoint environment. As a multi-tier application Sharepoint needs both a web front end and a database backend. We got word that Sharepoint was running slowly. Luckily we had just installed vCenter Operations and when we checked the console we noticed that 2 of the ESX hosts were in the Red category. After double clicking on the ESX host we saw that the network usage was the issue, with 100% of network being used similar to the graphic below that shows a systems at 100% of CPU being used.
The great part was looking further down the page on the ESX host we found the Child Objects. With a single child object being Red as well I was able to drill down into the exact machine.
Once we drilled down to the machine we found that the database server from Sharepoint was using 100% of my network capacity. Then we looked at the other ESX host that showed Red, we found out that it also only had a single machine with a Red status. It turned out that the second guest with a Red status was the Web front end for Sharepoint. We then backed out of the vCenter Operations console (which conveniently is integrated into the Virtual Infrastructure Client) and migrated the web server to the same ESX host as the SQL server. We gave vCenter Operations a couple minutes to make sure that the data was up to date and we were back to a healthy Green environment across the board.
Now that we know the network load could be impacting the rest of my environment when the two servers are split, we simply set an Affinity Rule on DRS. This forces the two servers to always stay on the same ESX host. Searches and document retrieval speeds from Sharepoint decreased almost immediately. Needless to say convincing the powers that be that instead of hours upon hours of troubleshooting a simple add-on product is sometimes worth its weight in gold. The next solutions might have been to move Sharepoint back to a physical environment, meaning the cost for new hardware that would have been a minimum of twice the cost of a simple monitoring and correlation product.
VMware FlowCharts Part 2 : SRM Installation
In an effort to make these processes as easy as possible heres the next in my series of flowcharts for supporting VMware. Keep in mind that this is simply for installation. Make sure you follow best practices and do a full application assessment before assuming your DR plan is complete. Attempting to deploy a DR plan for Exchange, SQL or any other multi-tier application without looking at all the interconnectivity will result in an unsuccessful DR failover. With that being said… heres the flowchart.
Are you sure you are following best practices on vSphere?
I have worked for multiple resellers throughout the years and one of the things that has been constant throughout has been that customers like to bring in an subject matter expert to do an initial deployment, but then after the initial deployment they let the environment remain status quo. Budgets tend to shrink with each passing year but the one area that should not get overlooked in maintenance of your infrastructure. As companies consolidate their servers and desktops onto a small subset of servers, the old system admin rule of “Always check from layer one up” carries even more weight, the physical layer quickly gives way to the hypervisor.
The challenge comes into play when you need to determine if you are truly following the best practices that have been put out by VMware. The do more with less mentality often means that IT staff are wearing multiple hats. This is the time to bring back in the VMware Solutions Provider or consultant and ask for one of the more underutilized tools in the consultants belt, the VMware HealthAnalyzer.
HealthAnalyzer is an automated process that collects inventory, configuration, and utilization data from the vSphere environment through the vSphere SDK. Once the data is collected the tool allows the solutions provider to produce a report grading the environment through a stop light mentality and display the findings and data in an easy to view format, including ways to re-mediate any pieces that are missing when compared to VMware Best Practices. The amount of time that the report takes is completely dependent on the size of your environment but in most SMB environments the data collection can be done in a single day without installing anything on the corporate environment. Once the data is collected, the consultant can compile and analyze the data to return the report card both in a written report as well as a summary presentation.
VMware FlowCharts Part 1 : View Upgrade
This is the first in a series of flowcharts to be used as easy to follow references when doing migrations and upgrades of VMware products.
Upgrading from View 3 to View 4.6 is the first of the series.
solutionsarchitect 