Hey Now! I was invited by Rick Vanover from Veeam to be a guest on the Veeam Community Podcast and we talk about all things about VMworld, home labs, and the "Three Views from You". Thanks again to Rick and the Veeam team for allowing me to be a part of this... it's always a blast

Here is the description:

In this episode, Rick Vanover hosts Kendrick Coleman. Kendrick (or Kenny) is a virtualization professional based in Louisville, KY. Kenny also blogs at KendrickColeman.com and has presented a few times at VMworld. In this episode, Rick and Kenny talk about virtualization home labs and a miscellaneous state of the union regarding virtualization.

Kenny is in the hot seat for "Three Views from You."

You can check out the podcast below or you can listen to it at Veeam's Podbean.

UPDATED VERSION!!!

Please go to - Design vCloud Director on VCE Vblock Systems - 2.0

Over the past few months, I've been working on a project with Chris Colotti and Sumner Burkhart of VMware along with Jeramiah Dooley and Sony Francis of VCE on a collaboration effort to design a best practice for running VMware vCloud Director on a Vblock.

It all began when I took the class VMware vCloud: Architecting the VMware Cloud and I had this urge to create a design so Vblocks could be deployed in a standard fashion so you could easily have vCD up and running on a Vblock in little time. There were many design considerations to take into account because the Vblock has many components and each of which has it's own constraints. I remember reading a blog from Chris Colotti called vCloud on Vblock – Findings from the field, so I got in touch with him via twitter to see if he would want to collaborate on such an effort. Once he was on board, Jeramiah and Sony reached out to me internally to see if they could join in. We decided it was best to draft up something that addresses everything we see today on current Vblock models along with vCloud Director 1.0.X and associated technology. This paper doesn't address the recently announced vCloud Director 1.5 components but most will remain unchanged except 1 or 2 sections depending upon changes in related technologies in the upcoming months.

This document is a joint effort between five people and doesn't reflect the supportability from our employers. This document is merely a reference architecture for running vCloud Director on a Vblock and it's associated technologies such as VNX, Fast Cache, Fully Automated Storage Tiering (FAST), Cisco Nexus 1000v, vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS), vShield Edge, and more.

THIS HAS BEEN UPDATED. PLEASE VISIT VMware vSphere 5 Host NIC Network Design Layout and vSwitch Configuration [Major Update]

As vSphere has progressed, my current 6, 10, and 12 NIC designs have slowly depreciated. In an effort to update these to VMware vSphere 5, I took the 2 most popular configurations of 6 and 10 NICs and updated the Visios to make them a bit more pretty. I also don't know how much longer these will be necessary as the industry moves forward with 10GbE as a standard.

The assumption of these physical NIC designs is that these hosts are going to be configured with Enterprise Plus Licensing so all the vSphere features can be used. I didn't create a bunch of different designs as before because ideally you would want to stick with a simple design that meets a bunch of criteria for most people. In addition, I have updated these configs for performing multi-pathing for iSCSI and removing the use of etherchannel configurations because those were mostly needed on standard vSwitch configurations. I would also recommend to start moving everything over to a vNetwork Distributed Switch configuration because it is the easiest way to standardize across all of your hosts. vSphere 5 implemented a better HA and failed host policy in vSphere 5 so the use of a hybrid solution is fading as well.

Another assumption that has been depicted in every diagram is the physical switch configuration. These configurations can be done via Cisco 3750Gs with cross-stack links so it's viewed as a single switch or a single highly available enterprise switch such as a Cisco 4500 or can be implemented in a vPC configuration of dual Cisco Nexus 5000 or 7000s. The most important thing to keep in mind is that the switches in these configurations are enterprise class and you aren't connecting two switches via LACP because if you are doing that then the load teaming/balancing settings needs be re-configured.

All of this information is freely available in a few whitepapers that are a part of VMware vCloud Architecture ToolKit (vCAT) 2.0. These sets of documents are very in-depth and offer a great learning experience for anyone looking into vCloud Director. Note: I'm not discovering anything new, I am just merely pointing out some of the caveats and thought considerations that may be brought up.

vCloud Director extends the capabilities of the vSphere layer and focuses on delivering an IaaS model where by consumers can request resources from a cloud environment. vCloud Director also packages the vCloud API along with it that allows custom applications to be written so you can talk to a vCloud instance.

Let's dive into the first standout feature of vCloud 1.5: SQL Database support. Originally, vCloud Director was only supported on Oracle databases, which may have been a big influence into it's lack of early adoption. I have written an article called Installing vCloud Director 1.5 With SQL Server 2008 that details the steps to install vCloud Director using SQL Server. Some design considerations to take into account now is your SQL Database VM Sizing and perhaps having multiple SQL VMs. There are many components in a vCloud Design that utilize a SQL database: vCloud Director, vCenter(s), VUM(s), Chargeback(s), vCenter Orchestrator, and more. The size of your VM is now greatly effected if you have all these databases living on a single VM. Of course it can be done, but there is also the possibility to split it out into multiple VMs. A constraint to keep in mind for running vCloud on SQL or Oracle is cross-compatibility if you ever decide to switch. Moving from Oracle to SQL isn't an easy process as indicated in a 167 page document. VMware recommends a 4vCPU VM, 16GB of RAM and 100GB of Storage.

OK readers, I've got a task I need help with. My vSphere 5 license keys don't allow me to report bugs to VMware and since I'm running vSphere on my Shuttle Boxes, they would automatically call me out on not being on the HCL. I'm asking for someone with a few minutes and a setup they can break to please test something out.

I'm currently rebuilding my lab from vSphere 5 beta build 384847 to vSphere 5 GA build 469512. vCenter is running GA build 455964. I try to mimic a 10GbE environment by using everything on 2 1GbE NICs sitting on a Virtual Distributed Switch (vDS). The issue rises when setting the MTU on the vDS to anything greater than 1500 MTU. I need to set the vDS to atleast 1524 MTU for a nested vCloud Director environment. When setting the vDS to a number greater than 1500, my iSCSI datastores all disconnect. This setup worked perfectly on vSphere 4.1 and even on vSphere 5 beta. I have a feeling that the issue is with vCenter 455964 and the vDS, but not the actual host itself because the ESXi host running build 384847 was running fine until I had to rebuild my vCenter server. The switch connecting all this is a HP ProCurve that supports Jumbo Frames and is turned on. This is all done using the hardware iSCSI initiator that is baked into my Broadcom BCM5709 NICs. So only test this if you have NICs that are capable of doing iSCSI and not utilizing the Software iSCSI Inititor provided by VMware.

One of my most popular articles has been Top 10 Free vSphere ESX Tools and Utilities. This list is all comprised of tools that can be found on A List of FREE VMware vSphere Tools. The old list was getting kind of stale because there are alot of new cool free utilities out there, especially those that didn't get put in from the VMware Labs.

This year, David Davis and I are doing our encore presentation at VMworld for Top 10 Free Tools For VMware vSphere of 2011. If you want to download the presentation with highlights of video demos, you can do so here... CIM1940 Presentation (warning, its 105mb!!). Time wasn't on my side this year to complete a matrix to be able to rank free tools based on a point scaling. These tools, in my opinion, are the best of what 2011 has had to offer. I have also gone through and done testing of whether or not it works with vSphere 5. The tools aren't ranked in any particular order.

Without further ado...

VCE is announcing the latest of solutions called the AlwaysOn Point of Care Solution, creating a resilient VDI Deployment with VMware View and Vblock. This will be the ONLY HA solution from VMware once it has been given the VMware-Ready logo which is only a few short days away. This solution is geared towards the expanding market of VDI in healthcare related deployments for a desktop anywhere approach even though this will work in many different scenarios. More documents will be coming out next week at VMworld, but here is a sneak peek.

AlwaysOn utilizes Imprvata's Single Sign On (OneSign), Cisco's ACE load balancer and VMware View 4.6 with PCoIP all running on Vblock Infrastructure Platforms.

The master image is replicated between Vblocks at multiple sites using VNX storage arrays. The "golden" desktop image uses EMC's Celerra Replicator to asynchronously copy the data between sites giving an automated backup mechanism. The View Administrator can use this method to update the golden image on each site through a manual or scripted procedure. The user data is also replicated between sites for failure protection. EMC's Recoverpoint can also be used if desired. The active-active desktops are access via Imprivata's SSO with the tap of a proximity card at a Wyse thin client terminal. The users session hits a Cisco ACE load balancer to balance out the traffic between sites or will be routed to the site holding the users desktop. The user can tap into another terminal and his/her desktop will move to the new terminal with a 5-8 second delay. In a disaster scenario, Cisco's ACE will re-route all existing and new desktop sessions to a secondary site. This solution has been tested and certified in VCE labs.

The twitterstream is buzzing, press releases are being announced, and everyone is preparing their livers for the awesomeness that is going to be next week. Last year's VMworld was my first and it is going to be hard to top, but I'm determined to make it better than ever. I wanted to throw some quick tips for those venturing out to Vegas next week. I learned most of these the hard way because it was my first major conference, but hopefully you can learn from my mistakes.

1. Only register for the sessions you know you can't miss. This year is going to be a bit different with the scheduling routine. Last year, it was first come, first serve for the session and many people were disappointed. This year, you have to pre-register for the sessions you want to attend. Don't be that guy who has sessions back-to-back because I'm 100% sure you aren't going to make those. Leave yourself atleast 15-30 minutes between sessions to make the hike. If you aren't at the door 5 minutes before the session starts, they are going to let people in the waiting line in first. Plus, I'm sure they overbooked some rooms and sessions, so don't be mad if you didn't show up early and lost your seat.
2. Don't spend all your time in sessions. This is the one event that you are going to be rubbing elbows with some of the brightest names in the industry. Make this time valuable by making face-to-face connections and sharing stories over lunch or a beer. You would be amazed by how close-nit the community really is. Just talk shop and have a good time.
3. Learn about some new products in the solutions exchange. From what I hear, the solutions exchange is going to be MASSIVE. With the booming horizon of cloud, new vSphere releases, and the VDI trend, the show room floor will be packed with startups that bring a new angle. Make the effort to visit a few booths that you've never heard of so you can get a feel for what they do and how they might help your business. From a blogger's perspective, it's the easiest way you can share all the new tech hitting the market and capitalize on a startup's new release.
4. Organization is key. Last year I only made it to half of the sessions I wanted to attend because I got caught up looking at the VMworld packet that you get once you register trying to figure out where I need to go. Look at tip number 1 and don't make yourself run around too much, you're going to need that energy for the night. Get the sessions you want to attend in your iPhone or Blackberry calendar the day before the conference. This way you don't look like a tourist in a new city.