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Chicago VMware Forum 2011 Free Hands on Labs available

Brian — Mon, 06 Jun 2011 14:42:34 +0000

The Chicago VMware Forum for 2011 is just around the corner on June 15th. Along with all of the great break out sessions topics and vendor booths VMware is going to be having their famous Hands on Labs. These are a great way to get you feet wet playing with some of the coolest technology from VMware and get your questions answered by VMware experts on-site.

We have added FREE Hands-On Labs for all attendees at VMware Forum 2011. This is your chance to explore our software firsthand with experts available to answer your questions. Topics include:

VMware vSphere™ — Install & Configure
VMware View™ 4.5 — Install and Configure
VMware ThinApp™ 4.6
VMware Performance Management vCenter™ Operations Standard and Enterprise
VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager – Extended Configure & Troubleshooting
VMware vCloud Director — Install & Configure
VMware vSphere Performance & Tuning

About Brian

Brian is a Technical Architect for a VMware partner and owner of this website. He is active in the VMware community and is helps lead the Chicago VMUG group. This blog Virtualize Tips was started to document and remember things that I come across while working with tech.

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An interview with Kendrick Coleman about his VMware vSphere home lab

Brian — Mon, 28 Feb 2011 02:15:27 +0000

These days it’s almost a necessity that if you want to continue to increase your technical skills you will need to build a home lab. With a lab at home you can learn new technology that you might not get the chance to work with at the office. In the safety of your Lab you can break things and fix them without any worries.

I was able to sit down and talk with Kendrick Coleman this month about his newly created home lab. I thought that Kendrick would be a great first victim for this column, since he just built his lab. Some of the choices that he picked for his equipment intrigued me and I wanted to learn more. In case you don’t know Kendrick he is a vArchitect for VCE and works with Service Providers in his role evangelizing the benefits of the VCE stack. I hope to find other interesting home lab stories for upcoming issues.

Why did you create your home lab?

To keep myself up to date with all things related to vSphere. Since joining VCE as a vArchitect my role is more of a Pre-Sales function. I don’t have that daily access to servers in a datacenter to test out features.

How long did it take you to assemble?

I really took about a month to do research on the parts that I purchased for the lab. I spoke with people online and read a lot of blogs that others wrote on their labs. I needed to decide if I was going to go with one really large server or two servers with shared storage model.

What do you want to test in the lab?

I’ve been working with the Uber Celerra VSA that Nick created and the Cisco UCS emulator. I will also be checking out the Uber UIM VM that Nick setup. A lot of my time at VCE will be centered around architecting VDI and vCloud Director solutions. So I will be working with these products to test out different solutions that will help me in my designs.

What type of equipment is on your wish list for future lab upgrades?

The one thing that I would really like to upgrade in the future would be to get another NAS device and add SSD’s into it so that I could test the difference in performance.

How often have you been using the lab?

I’ve been using it a ton lately but I also just finished building it. So my wife has already been complaining about my time spent with the lab.

Do you keep it running all of the time?

Yes it’s just a few feet from me as we are speaking and I can barely hear it. That was my goal by looking for products that are green. By selecting these parts I was able to keep the power consumption low and also build a lab that is very quiet. I built the shuttle systems without hard drives or optical drives this kept the cost down and I can barely hear them running.

Will you be running anything other than VMware products in the lab?

I only plan on running things that related to what I’m doing as a vArchitect. So things like a Nexus 1000V virtual switch, VMware products and EMC / Cisco offerings that tie in with VCE. I don’t think that I’ll be running anything else. I don’t plan on becoming an SQL DBA or a Microsoft guru or anything like that.

What is the best thing that you have learned so far?

The best thing so far was to take your time and make sure that you do your research on the products that you buy. You will want to make sure that the motherboard and parts will work with vSphere. I highly recommend that you choose a network card that is on the VMware HCL, while I was able to do some driver injection to get the onboard Nic to work I still have some issues with it.

You choose to run ESXi on both servers why?

I went with ESXi on both because it allowed me to go diskless on both servers and boot from USB sticks.

What method are you using to connect to the shared storage?

Right now I am using both iSCSI and NFS. This allows me to play with both methods and I recently setup CHAP authentication for the iSCSI. That’s something that I never did in the past. During this I encountered an error with the iSCSI and was able to take the time and correct it rather than just starting over.

Kendrick also wrote up an extensive post on his blog that talks about some of the technical setup steps that he went through. It’s a great read and I suggest you give it a look also at this link.

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VMware Labs releases PyvCO for vCO communications

Brian — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 00:49:51 +0000

Earlier today the crack team over at VMware Labs released a new Fling or app. The Labs team creates these pet projects and releases them to the community to offer creative solutions for admins to use.

VMware Labs presents PyvCO – Python bindings for VMware Orchestrator.

This module helps in integration of vCO in a Python environment as well as a useful testing environment. Some of the uses are:

Communicate with vSphere 4.1 vCO using SOAP interface.
Provide a consistent API for synchronous and asynchronous applications (Twisted is supported)
Create, delete a file or a directory in guest
Write tests targeting vCO.
Provide enough information to extend vmw.vco in such a way that above use cases remain consistent.

Be one of the first one to try, rate and comment – http://labs.vmware.com/flings/pyvco

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VMware Labs announces VIX Plugin for vCenter Orchestrator

Brian — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 18:14:12 +0000

Looks like the engineers at VMware are not slowing down with the cool toys they keep releasing via VMware Labs. These are usually side projects for them that are very helpful to the community. This one I can see a lot of possibilities for. The ability to copy files to and from a VM guest could save time. Also being able to run scripts and affected processes from outside the VM.

vCenter Orchestrator(vCO) supports extended functionality using plug-ins. This VIX plug-in allows users to automate virtual machine operations within guest operating systems as vCO Javascript objects and methods to create workflows to run operations within a Windows/Linux Guest. Some of the sample workflow provide the following functionality:

Check for a file or a directory in guest
Copy file from guest to vCO and from vCO to guest
Create, delete a file or a directory in guest
List directory content
List, stop processes in guest
Run a program or script in guest

You can download it from the following link – http://labs.vmware.com/flings/vix-vco .

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More VMware iPad app goodness at VMworld Copenhagen 2010

Brian — Fri, 15 Oct 2010 02:35:35 +0000

Some people were hoping to hear that the VMware iPad app for vSphere Management would be released at VMworld Copenhagen but that was not the case. We did get another look at the applications and a glimpse at a new VMware product that works nicely with the iPad also.

In the first section of the video we get another peek at the VMware vSphere management iPad app. There are some improvements that were made since we first say it at VMworld San Francisco. In the video he mentions that they hope to release a Beta version in a few weeks and then the final version late 2010 as a VMware Labs Fling. We get to see how you can now power cycle or restart a VM, get a look at home much CPU and Memory it’s consuming and some other details.

The next part of the video shows us the VMware View Client for iPad. We see a demo of it logging into the View portal at VMware corporate and connecting to a Windows 7 VDI machine. He then showcases the virtual Touch Pad that we had heard about in the last video from San Fran. The improvements that were made to the virtual keyboard are pretty cool. I like how they have added the Windows function keys and other standard keys that will make using a Windows VDI on an Apple iPad easier. VMware is definitely stepping up the level for portable VDI with this application.

In the final part of the video we get to see the web interface for the newly announced vCloud Request Manager from the iPad. This allows for requests to be made inside of vCloud Director that will require a managers approval. You are able to view all of your prior requests and see what is pending, approved or denied. This looks really cool and will go a long way for improving the mobility for people working with VMware and vCloud.

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Updated version of VMware Guest Console (VGC) has arrived

Brian — Wed, 02 Jun 2010 18:18:56 +0000

The VGC is probably my personal favorite from VMware Labs so far. It is a simple but powerful utility with some cool features you don’t get with the standard vSphere client. I wrote about VMware guest console in the past covering its basic features that you can read here. Listed below are the latest features to be added or updated to this little Gem. You can have a look at VMware labs and download VGC for yourself here.

Performance & Scalability -
1. VM retrieval is enhanced to discover VMs in much lesser time.
2. VGC can manage up to 315 Powered On VMs on all connected servers. Number of VMs retrieved from a server will be limited once this limit is reached.
Support for 64 bit Windows has been added.
Remote Console feature has been extended to work with VMs hosted on vCenter.
Workspace files created with this version of VGC will be encrypted. However, workspace files created using earlier versions are not compatible with this release.
VM Templates are differentiated from regular VMs.
Workspace files can now be loaded in VGC by double clicking the .vgc files.

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Ops Panel for ESX is the latest release from VMware Labs

Brian — Wed, 19 May 2010 13:55:07 +0000

The latest release from the VMware Labs team is Ops panel. It’s a pretty simple idea that adds a list of virtual machines located on a host and provides some basic power related functions. You can access this from the default web page of the ESX host. You can see a short video on this release on the Labs site.

The Operations Panel is a script tool, which runs on the client browser and extends the default ESX server web page with a short list of all available virtual machines. It gives the user the ability to perform simple power operations (start, stop, suspend, resume). Easily accessible user interface for some of the most common operations on an ESX host, available directly from the ESX home page.

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VMware labs Guest Console is a great tool

Brian — Sun, 21 Mar 2010 17:34:18 +0000

I’ve been taking some time when it’s available to play with some of the great tools available from the VMware Labs site that launched recently. The Labs site offers tools developed by talented people that are not yet ready for general release but are very good programs. The latest one that I tried was the VMware Guest Console. Not knowing what it was going to be since there are a few others like this from 3rd party developers already.

The VGC as it’s also known has been a pleasant surprise. It’s way more than just a remote control application. I have broken down some of the biggest features below along with screen shots. Some of my favorite features so far are the ability to open a putty session to the ESX host, Open the VM console or RDP session to the VM from the application. You can also use file explorer to see the local drives on the VM and Task Manager of the VM to see what processes are running. You can download the VGC application here.

Once you have connected to a ESX host or vCenter server you will get many of the standard options for a host or virtual machine. You work with snapshots of a Virtual Machine such as Create, Go To or Remove a Snapshot. There are also the standard VMware power related tools to allow for power on/off, reset and suspend of a Virtual Machine. You also have the option to upgrade the tools in the guest machine.

Lets take a look at the guest console options. You have a few options related to the Terminal and Console buttons depending on if you are selecting a Host or Guest machine. You can see from the picture below that if you choose the console selection from menu while selecting a Guest machine you will get the VM console of that guest. From there you can use the Device menu to connect to a Floppy or CD image and see details about the network adapters. Along the bottom of the screen you also have icons giving you feed back about what devices are connected to this guest machine. You can launch a RDP session by clicking the Terminal button while selecting a Windows guest machine.

Next up would be the ability to look into the Guest machine and work with Task Manager. Once you have authenticated with the Guest machine you will be able to access the Task Manager to see and interact with the process running on the machine. For this I used a Windows guest machine and was able to End a process or End a similar process by right clicking on an item. If you use the Applications menu from the menu at the top you can also select the “New Task” selection to execute a application in the Guest Machine. There is also an option to Save Processes Details which will export to a .CSV file. The file will give you a listing of the processes running at the time of the capture into a file.

Next up would be the File Explorer section. From this section you will be able to browse the local drives of the Guest Machine much like using Windows Explorer. From here you can choose to download a file or folder and also be able to upload files to the Guest. This could be very handy in uploading something that you need to while connected to the console.

There are a few other basic features of the application that are very similar to working with guests and the host from the vSphere client or vCenter server so I did not cover them here. One nice thing was the ability to click on a host then the Virtual Machine tab and you get the following view that shows things like Guest name, IP Address, Uptime, OS Type, Authenticated user and some basic virtual hardware information.

So if any of these features sound appealing to you I would highly suggest that you give the VGC a test run and see how it might help you in your daily work. Remember you can download it from the VMware Labs.

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