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 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.

Managing VMware with your Ipad

The world is geared towards being able to work remotely, yet VMware has been less than speedy finding a way to manage the ESX environment from a mobile device. Sure they released the vCenter Mobile Access (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9UxDnV2qaeM&fmt=18), which is great if you are not using a device that has any graphic power. However, why not use something that is easy but still gives an administrator the ability to see their environment and maybe even work with it some?

VManage does exactly that. For $2.99 an administrator can use their iPhone or iPad to connect via WiFi or VPN to their environment and see alarms, stats, and even VMotion machines.  It will even inherit the permissions you set within vCenter so the admins will only see what the primary datacenter admin has given them rights to.

Overall VManage is a really nice product for quick access and knowledge of your VMware environment. Take a look at a short demo that illustrates the ease of using VManage.