I've had free Xangati for ESX running in my environment for a week or so now and I wasn't sure if it was working correctly. I've read all the quickstart guides and manual and I'm going to show you how to properly setup the appliance and your vSphere environment and test out network throughput.

Let's go over the installation and how to setup your vSphere environment.

1. Download the Xangati Appliance and Unzip it to your desktop or wherever you have a good network connection to vCenter because you are going to be moving around 1.3 GB of data. You should be left with a XESX folder with an OVF and some VMDKs
2. Open up your vSphere Client and Click on File -> Deploy OVF Appliance...
   • Choose your OVF file and begin the setup process
   • When choosing a name, make sure you choose something that will correlate with the ESX server you are monitoring. For instance, if I have MyESXi04, I want to name my new appliance Xangati04
   • Choose Thin Provisioning for the type of disk
   • Do not worry about choosing the network port groups right now because we are going to change all of that.
   • Click finish and wait about 5 or so minutes for the appliance to complete installation

Xangati is on a roll! After winning a Best of VMworld award for Virtualization Management, they are releasing their Top 10 Free Tool as a chance for you to win big. At VMworld, Xangati had one of the most interesting banners that probably caught everyone's attention. WIN $5000! Who cares about winning iPads, when you can buy yourself 10 iPads and still have money left over to buy beer!

If you were at VMworld, you probably thought that just getting your badge swiped put you in the drawing for $5000, well you have to put forth a bit more effort. Here's how to enter the contest (by the way, this contest is for everyone, not just VMworld attendees):

1)  Install Xangati for ESX from the DVD you received at our booth at VMworld or from
www.xangati.com/free-download

My first VMworld has come and gone and I feel like this was my greatest high yet. Everyone remembers D.A.R.E. in school right? When the officer said, people become drug addicts because they are always reaching for that same level of high as the first time. After VMworld, I'm going to go to different events and perhaps next years VMworld and won't reach this same level of high.

First and foremost, I can't say enough how twitter pretty much rocked this VMworld for me. Over the past two years I've been talking to loads of people on twitter and I easily met over 100 people last week. If it wasn't for these people, social gatherings would have had no meaning what-so-ever, but I probably would have been in bed at a reasonable time. Instead of trying to strike up conversations with someone you never met before, it was easy to get on topic and discuss. The best part was not talking about technology, but really getting to know someone that you interact with through twitter. I got to meet all kinds of industry experts and it was even better that they knew me as well.

I finally put my flip video to work and recorded the VMworld 2010 Tuesday keynote for a good tech overview of everything that was announced. Enjoy

The first announcement from VMworld this week was the debut of what we all called "Project Redwood". It has now been revealed as VMware vCloud Director and vCloud Datacenter.

Do we call it the "Secure Private Cloud"? The cloud is a journey, so how do we get there?

What will vCloud try to achieve? Pooling is the heart of vCloud. Greater pooling drives greater utilization which drives lower cost. Automation. Self-service workloads. Control with application-aware infrastructure. Open & Interoperable so it enables the hybrid cloud. Leverage existing environment and people to move forward.

vShield App, Edge, and Endpoint Security

The legacy way of doing things are going to slowly fade away. VMware wants to start hitting all those air gaps within the VI and are going to make security people re-think administration.

Currently, you have to secure yourself on all areas. A firewall on the perimeter isn’t enough. In addition to firewalls you can have VPN concentrators, IDS devices, and load balancers. Internal security can be done via subnet or VLANs and interior firewalls such as a windows firewall. End point security is done via Desktop anti-virus agents and other types of host based intrusion. You can’t realize the full benefit of security in virtualization without worrying about vlan or firewall rules sprawl to take care of security. There are always holes.

I went to the Future of Virtualized Networks with Howie Xu this morning and I thought I was going to hear about some new amazing technology, from the vFabric buzz. Not so much. His first sentence was this isn't a product or even a roadmap. It's just a vision.

Virtualized networks are still in development and is going to continually be a journey. Its a big push to put networking guys into the virtual infrastructure and continue to converge the two.

VMware sees it's current networking journey to go from the managed vSwitch to the vNetwork Distributed Switch and on to the "Distributed
Virtual Network". More companies are going to start playing the Nexus 1000V game and integrating more with vSphere.

The journey has 4 key concepts:
Anything. Being able to put whatever you want out there
Anytime. Spinning up and done workload instantaneously with end to end Layer 2 to 7 networking
Anywhere. Deploying workloads where there is computing capacity without network  constraint
Any Scale. Scaling workloads up and down, horizontally, vertically, easily and economically

I'm back on the free tools vibe again. I'll be presenting with David Davis at VMworld in his breakout session discussing the Top Free vSphere Tools.

David wants your input! Head on over to VMwareVideos.com and vote for your favorite free tool! David will calculate the results and announce those rankings in video form – before the end of 2010.