Aug
31
VMworld and Updated Schedule
Filed Under Uncategorized, VMware, VMworld | Leave a Comment
VMworld is here! I have a busy week ahead at the event. I’ve updated my jam packed schedule below, as I changed a few things since my original post that outlined my schedule. Thrown into that mix are a few happy hours, invite only parties, and tweetups. Also, on Wednesday evening is the VMworld party. I’ll be blogging and tweeting as much as I can from VMworld. I look forward to seeing and meeting everyone!
| BC1500 – vCenter Site Recovery Manager Up and Running” – Best Practices & Avoiding the Pitfalls” |
| BC3209 – Creating the Fastest Possible Backups Using VMware Consolidated Backup -A Design Blueprint |
| LAB03 – VMware View Advanced Config & Troubleshooting |
| TA2713 – Safe At Any Speed with VMware DRS & DPM |
| SS5082 – Cisco and VMware: Delivering Innovation for Virtualization |
| VM2241 – Managing vSphere with VMware PowerCLI |
| EA2631 – Virtualizing Exchange 2007 on vSphere 4 – Technical Considerations and Customer Success Story |
| TA2467 – Best Practices to Increase Availability and Throughput for the Future of VMware |
| DV2223 – Printing Considerations in a View Architecture |
| TA2384 – Deploying Cisco Nexus 1000V in a VMware vSphere Environment |
| TA3264 – iSCSI Scalability and Storage Performance Enhancements in vSphere 4.0 |
| LAB04 – VMware vSphere™ 4 – Performance Optimization & Troubleshooting |
| TA3603 – Getting The Most Out Of VMotion: EVC, Performance Tuning, and Troubleshooting |
| EA3376 – Virtualizing Citrix XenApp using vSphere |
| DV1392 – Best Practices for Integrating VMware View with Active Directory |
| TA1541 – Cool little things marketing did not tell you about vSphere 4.0 |
| TA2963 – ESXtop for Advanced Users |
Aug
24
Citrix Open vSwitch Appears Online
Filed Under Open vSwitch | 1 Comment
I received a tweet today from Scott Lowe making a mention of the new vSwitch that Citrix is introducing. Several comments followed on twitter from other VMware employees regarding the Open vSwitch versus the Nexus 1000V.
The vSwitch is still in beta. It does appear to be a good addition/capability for XenServer.
Read more here and here on the new Open vSwitch from Citrix.
Aug
19
Since Provisioning Server is such a key component to a XenDesktop implementation, I started gathering key sources of information on Provisioning Server implementation, configuration, and availability best practices. After playing around in the lab with Provisioning Server I felt that there was some additional considerations lacking. Thus, my search for further information. Read more
Aug
16
High Availability for vCenter
Filed Under vCenter | 2 Comments
vCenter is such an important part of the virtual infrastructure. I thought I’d outline a way to provide high availability to vCenter so that readers have a better idea on how to implement HA for their vCenter environment.
There are several solutions today that facilitate high availability and recovery for vCenter with little to no downtime.
Recently, VMware released the vCenter Heartbeat product to ensure vCenter HA. This product is licensed from the NeverFail Group.
In additon, Double-Take and CA XoSoft are solutions that can help. This demonstration uses CA XoSoft as the solution to provide HA for vCenter. I chose this simply because I already have some familiarity with the product. Other solutions will provided similar capability and should be considered as well. This demonstration was done with vCenter 2.5 but would also work with 4.0.
Enjoy!
To see a full screen HD version click on the expand button in the video.
Aug
12
VMware View New Reference Architectures And Some Notes on Monitoring View
Filed Under VMware View | Leave a Comment
VMware released several new reference architectures today related to VMware View. The VMware View reference architecture itself has been out for a while. This is a helpful guide in giving example architecture and sizing best practices.
In addition to the VMware View reference architecture, the VMware View WAN Reference Architecture and VMware ThinApp Reference Architecture are now available. These two documents expand on WAN optimization best practices and ThinApp application deployment methods that the initial View reference architecture did not expand on.
The use cases in the reference architectures appeared to be helpful and the tips outlined were too.
One item I’d like to see more on is monitoring of the VMware View components and monitoring from end-to-end to ensure a quality user experience. From an architecture and planning perspective this capability should also be taken into account. This will facilitate being able to identify where issues actually are. For example, is the issue latency, virtual desktop performance issue, or endpoint issue? I’ve been asked the monitoring question several times. Citrix provides a great solution called EdgeSight. VMware also has recently released vCenter AppSpeed which may help some in end-to-end monitoring. There are several vendors that appear to have solutions for a VMware View environment. There may be more, but these are a few below:
http://www.aternity.com/desktop-virtualization.htm
http://www.rtosoft.com/products/PinPoint/PinPoint.htm
http://www.eginnovations.com/web/vmware-distinguishingfeatures.htm
