Blog Posts

Please join me in congratulating Desmond Chan as the new expert highlighted on the VIOPS front page.

Desmond was one of the original moderators of VIOPS and has been a strong supporter within the VMware technical community. He has been a leading contributor to VIOPS by authoring five top quality proven practices. Here are two examples of his latest work.

• VMware Data Recovery Dedupe Store Setup Guideline

• Proven Practice: Splitting a VirtualCenter Server Installation

Great work, Desmond, keep it coming!

VMware is exhibiting at the Wireless Enterprise Symposium (WES), RIM’s big user conference, for the first time this year. If you’re attending come by our booth, no. 603 – we’ll have demos and technical papers available with information about virtualizing enterprise messaging apps (specifically Exchange and BlackBerry Enterprise Server). Also on hand will be two of the VMware IT team responsible for administering VMware’s own virtualized BES environment - so bring your questions about virtualizing BES and see if you can stump them.

We also have a demo session on Wednesday, May 6th at 3:00 p.m. in the Demo Theater. We’re planning two demos: Exchange on VMware, and the new VMware Fault Tolerance feature being used to ensure email availability for a BlackBerry that belongs to a Very Important Person.

WES is happening in Orlando FL from May 5-7. You can learn more about WES and register for it here: http://www.attendwes.com/

The new VMware ISV Center helps application ISVs maximize their partnership with VMware to lower the TCO of their applications, greatly improve service levels, and revolutionize their customers’ experience. Use the ISV Center to :

• Explore how to deliver better solutions to your customers by running your applications on the VMware platform. Read about all the features that your applications automatically inherit when they run on a VMware-managed virtual machine

• Support your applications on the VMware platform to make sure they will run with the highest availability and performance. Submit an official support statement, read about best practices for testing your applications on our platform, and learn about training and support options we make available to our partners.

• Deliver and deploy applications more efficiently, securely, and cost-effectively on the VMware platform. Learn about Virtual Appliances and ThinApp, two different approaches you may use to encapsulate your applications and deliver them ready to plug into your customer’s environment.

The ISV Center also provides timely and valuable information such as how to adjust licensing models for virtual environments, and customer success stories regarding deployments of business and enterprise applications on the VMware platform.

If you are an ISV Customer, see the Business Critical Applications section.

Visit the ISV Center today!

Hello folks, reminder that the VIOPS Capacity Management Webinar is now just one day away - if you haven't registered yet, please follow the link below.

The webinar is the first of its kind to provide practical capacity management expertise from recognized industry experts, specifically for VMware Infrastructure - don't miss it!

Evoking images of the September harvest, but this time in March and without the heat and dust... everyone wants to benefit as much as possible from the great content on show at VMworld Europe, so this time we thought we'd formalize it a bit and create some VIOPS content from the VMworld Europe sessions.

This is not copying the sessions into VIOPS; they have a great home over on vmworld.com where you'll be able to see and hear the session recordings. The plan instead is to keep developing the VIOPS tradition of adding value to existing content by syndicating the practical content from a session into a proven practice document, adding more guidance and references to it, and then connecting that document to the knowledge zones on VIOPS like "Security".

To track this work, we have created a new project in the Community Zone called VMworld Harvesting.

Ken Thacker has kicked things off by creating the VMworld Harvesting List

- the goal now is for the community to work through that list and identify which ones are in-scope and out-of-scope for harvesting.

The rules are simple: if the session has practical advice on how to do something, like a "best practice" session, then it is a candidate for harvesting.

Check out the list, make your recommendations, offer to own a task and write up the proven practice for a VMworld Europe session!

VMware's branding machine has kindly donated their latest batch of goodness to the VMware ecosystem. Check out:

• Library VMware Icons and Diagrams

• The specified document was not found.

Use the graphics in the first presentation to build your own presentation as it includes object icons for virtual machines and others, plus diagrams for solutions like VDC-OS.

The second document is for you architects out there: Maish Saidel-Keesing transferred the icons and diagrams into Visio stencils, so now you can build your own architecture diagrams using VMware's expensive looking graphics!

With thousands of downloads already, I think the feedback so far has been "AWESOME!"

Joe Holland has just posted his first (but hopefully not the last!) document How to configure ESXi to shutdown using an APC SmartUPS.

His introduction says it all:

This tutorial will show you how to configure a VMWare ESXi install to shutdown using an APC SmartUPS. This proven practice came about because our company was sending a Dell PowerEdge T300 server with ESXi and a APC UPS to one of our sales offices. Because it would just be this server and the UPS there, we needed a way for ESXi to shutdown the guest operating systems and then itself gracefully.

Welcome, Joseph!

Over the next two months this community will be producing a VI3 Server Consolidation 60-point Deployment Blueprint, which is a collection of documents representing the activities that, over approximately 180 days, will build a complete server consolidation solution from the "P2V Pipeline" to the backend VMware Infrastructure.

Why pick the topic of server consolidation and not, say, Developer environments, or Desktop? Well we had to pick one to start with and the primary driver and focus for virtualization right now in this economic climate is cost savings, and that's what consolidation does and there's a good mix of those who've already succeeded and those who are still trying it. There are other ways to save money through operational efficiencies, and deploying desktop, but we had to start somewhere and server consolidation is by far the common case. If you have or want other kinds of blueprints, start a discussion thread in this forum and tell us what's on your mind.

You can get news from this blog via RSS and we'll be updating this blog at least once a week, but we'd really like you to get more involved as explained in this thread Roll up, roll up! 60-point deployment blueprint.

One thing that was clear from our recent survey is that you want to see more than just proven practices. We have a lot of valuable information and tools available at VMware. Problem is, they can sometimes be hard to find. What I'll try to do here is add some references to things that I think are important to the strategic planning required for a successful VMware installation. First up is the "Roadmap to Virtualization". This paper is based on the experience of our Professional Services Organization in helping our clients become Operationally Ready for implementing virtualization across their data center. These Operational Readiness engagements have been very successful in helping people overcome the people and process issues that arise during a migration to virtualization. Although most of our customers have been large enterprises. The concepts here apply to all but the smallest of organizations. I hope you find these links useful and if not, let us know.

Thanks, and have a Happy New Year in 2009.

Bob

Not only do you get built-in clustering with VMware with High Availability, which now clusters at the VM level not just the host level, but you can run other clustering products on VMware. Check out:

• Deploying Red Hat Cluster Suite on VMware from Milan Karalic

• Oracle RAC on ESX from Tim Hall

• Reference Implementation: Clustering VirtualCenter 2.5

There's something missing, though... who can write up a Veritas Cluster practice - I worked on one of those three years ago, but I don't have my notes...

Some time ago I asked the community What other applications do we need proven practices for? I picked the top ten and created a new poll online to see which ones this community wants to focus on.

It's clear that Microsoft apps come the top of the list. The good news is that I know that all of them have been virtualized, in production, by existing customers, today. Now we need to find out how they did it!

Inside VMware we can find out the way(s) to do it - but I think the best answers come from the members of this community. So, have a look at the poll and see if you've virtualized any of these - and are you willing to write up what you did?

In most cases, virtualizing an application is straight forward... create VM, install OS, install app etc. but you might wish to include the design considerations, perhaps the infrastructure topology - be as creative as you like. You can upload images, even link to YouTube content -)

I'm going to ask Chris Skinner if he might kick things off with Active Directory because I can't believe people are STILL not virtualizing it, and I did this with customers over four years ago...but Chris is the master!

Cheers

Steve

Virtualization Compliance has become a hot topic lately, particularly in the retail environment. For that industry, there are a confluence of factors that have come together:

• The imposition of the PCI standards on the majority of merchants who process credit cards

• The fact that PCI is one of the more prescriptive security standards out there, but yet does not acknowledge virtualization as a technology

• The growing desire for retailers to virtualize their store environments, due to the tremendous savings that can be achieved when server consolidation is leveraged across hundreds or even thousands of locations

Other standards such as HIPAA and SOX are of course top of mind for IT administrators in those respective industries, and I expect to see more direct questions from virtualization admins in those areas as time goes on.

To help answer the question, "how can I achieve compliance in my virtualized environment", we recently launched the VMware Compliance Center. We have provided some overview information, a list of partner solutions that can help with achieving, maintaining, and demonstrating compliance, and a list of resources, including whitepapers, webcasts, and podcasts from leading vendors in this area.

I would love to here comments from people both on what more you'd like to see in the Compliance Center, as well as on what are the burning issues that you face with compliance, and maybe some tips or lessons learned that you can share with others.

The charter for VIOPS is to widen the virtualization discussion beyond pure technology, and start to open the door to people and process. What is the impact of virtualization on the staff that use it, the application folks that rely on it? What about all those service management processes, how do they change?

This change is all positive as far as my four years have shown. In terms of people, I've tried to capture those changes that we've worked with customers on, and the result is Proven Practice: Five successful people practices to succeed with virtualization.

This is a big subject but I've tried to capture all the things that we work with customers on... skills, building a team, training, getting temporary resources to help you out... they are all listed in what I hope is a helpful manner.

Have a read and tell me if it's helpful. I think our Education team have more training courses now, but I'll ask them to make THOSE updates

Gavin Joliffe of Xtravirt was one of the very first contributors to VIOPS with a Proven Practice: VI3 Security Risk Assessment.

You're reading this because you already know that security is a key part of virtualization, probably because it changes the game somewhat. Being ever the optimist, I'm a fan of saying "enhanced" instead of "changed" or "broken", but that's just my sunny Yorkshire disposition.

What Xtravirt have done in their document is to encapsulate their experience of running their own security process for virtualization for themselves (prior to starting Xtravirt) and now on behalf of clients - that's a lot of experience!

That is the kind of document and experience we need for VIOPS proven practices. Instead of trying to create something that tries to be all things to all people, Xtravirt have focussed in on what has been successful for them and written it up.

Steve

Desmond Chan, who has graciously taken up ownership of the Management Zone (thanks, Desmond!), has just published a Proven Practice: Evaluating VMware Stage Manager Use Cases.

This is in response to many requests from folks on "How do I work out if Stage Manager is for me, or not?". Desmond explains the System Requirements and the Use Cases, and what to do next. This is a standard evaluation procedure that should be useful - if not, speak up (but if it IS useful, please tell Desmond!).

Do you need more evaluation guides like this? What about a proof of concept guide? Post a question / request / idea in the Management Zone forum and let's do something.

Steve