Today, VCE Announced alot of cool things around Vblock 100, 200, 300, 700, SAP Systems, and VCE Vision OS. To read all about it, please see my other blog post VCE Mega Launch Technical Details for 2/21 Product Announcements. It will have all the information you need.

This blog post is going to be for the eye candy for Vblock 100 BX I saw out in the wild.

For the Vblock 100. here's the speeds and feeds:

Vblock 100 Release

The Vblock 100 is a solution for Small to Mid-sized data centers and Enterprise Distributed remote locations. With pre-defined fixed configurations, the Vblock System 100 can be shipped to your location in approximately 30 days of order—and fully operational in as little as two more.

So what's in the Vblock 100?

There are two models of the Vblock 100. BX and DX. The BX is a half-height 24RU cabinet while the DX is the standard 42RU cabinet.

On Thursday February 21st, VCE announced their mega-launch. There is a bunch of cool releases that have been announced. I'm going to cover a few certain topics:

• What VCE set out to do, and our value over reference architecture
• Vblock 100 Release
• Vblock 200 Release
• Vblock 300 & 700 Refreshes
• Specialized Vblock Systems for SAP HANA
• VCE's new Vision Intelligent Operations software

What VCE set out to do, and our value over reference architecture

VCE is now in it's third generation of Vblock products. I have been here since the beginning and seen the products change over the past 3 years. It's been an amazing roller coaster of fun and it's even better to start seeing the market shift. VCE now has some actual competitors that try to do what it is we do. Heck, even Gartner came out with a new category that clearly defines Fabric-Based infrastructure and guess what you don't see in there? VSPEX and FlexPod. Finally, everyone is starting to see that those two compete with one another, not Vblock. Even more so, customers are starting to realize that there is a new evolution in data center operations. It's no longer about building out infrastructure, instead it's about moving to a cloud infrastructure where orchestration plays a key role and monitoring the overall operations is more important. That means you need to quit focusing on hardware and start thinking much higher in the stack. Customers turn to VCE because of our success track record of having over 1000+ Vblocks in the field, the effort our QA teams spend on testing out versions of software and firmware so you don't have to, the speed to market VCE delivers, having over 1200+ employees world-wide that only focus on Vblock (find another company that strong that focuses on converged infrastructure), and a world-class support organization that assists in life cycle support. If you don't know much about VCE and the value we bring, please read my previous post The VCE Certification Matrix - Ensuring Integration, and reach out to me to learn more. VCE is going to sky rocket this year with these new announcements, so get ready to see a Vblock in a datacenter near you.

Why?

I wanted to create a list of free tools that you can use with vSphere. Not just 30-day trial tools, but actually *free* tools. I will be testing out all these applications in the next 2 months in preparation for a Top 5 or 10 blog and presentation at the Kentuckiana Virtualization Users Group meeting May21st

Top 10 Articles from Previous Years

Top 10 Free VMware vSphere Tools and Utilities for 2011

The Top 10 Free vSphere ESX Tools and Utilities post has been released. (2010 Article)

If you want to dive into performance, take a look at VM Advanced ISO. Free Tools for Advanced Tasks

vSphere Utilities & Programs

RVTools - uses the VI SDK 2.5 to display information about your virtual machines and ESX hosts.

VMVision Manager - A new way to view the virtual machines in your environment

CPUID System Information - shows the VMHost CPU Info by NTPRO

VMware CPU Host Info 2.01 - allow you to read out all CPU information from all your ESX Servers by querying your VC server. It will show what features are available on your CPUs and if they are compatible to vmotion VMs and if FT is supported.

Vizioncore vOptimizer WasteFinder - 3.0 - scans vCenter and can shrink VMDKs to reclaim storage and can also realign VMDKs to 64k on 2 VMs for free.

PHD Virtual Patch Downloader 6.2.0.5 - simplifies the task of downloading patches for various ESX and ESXi versions (including vSphere) by automating the task.

Loadstorm - utility to generate CPU and/or memory load within a virtual machine. Great for testing out DRS

vmClient - a lightweight tool which enables you to control the power of your virtual machines, it’s also capable of presenting the MKS console of your virtual machines (Read More)

EDIT **2/17/13**

These lines of drives do terrible at I/O performance. Instead, they are better suited for application or media streaming

Benchmark Results: Streaming Reads/Writes, 4 KB Random Reads/Writes

I ran into this little gem after seeing a SlickDeal. I had never heard of it before, but Western Digital has come out with a new line of desktop 3.5" form drives called their "Red" line. This Red line is unlike their Black, Blue and Green. Western Digial has been seeing an uptick of people using 3.5" drives in NAS appications for home use. It's grea to see Western Digital come out with a new line of drives because I believe these are perfect for vSphere Home Lab use. I always preferred the Black line of drives because unlike the Green and Blue, there is no power saving functionality. The Green and Blue line of drives can end up corrupting data because if the drives aren't in use, then they can be put to sleep by the built-in firmware.

So I have installed vCenter Chargeback before, but i remember the installation being a little tricky. I tried doing a quick google search to see if there were any good detailed step by steps out there and nothing really turned up (or their blog doesn't have good SEO). So let's get going

1. Make sure your Windows VM is set with a static IP address.

2. Create a database. Oracle and SQL can be used. I'm going with SQL. Pretty Simple to do and no advanced options to change.

This was something sent by one of my readers and felt it was a worthy post.

There is a pretty cool little mulit-tiered Spring application that comes from VMware called Pet Clinic. I got the chance to play around with it for a little while during a current POC process and using it as an easy way to get apps spun up for tradeshows.

Pet Clinic has 2 virtual machines inside the vApp. An Apache Server and a Tomcat + Database Server. The vApp itself comes configured with static IP addresses, pre-configured application based on IPs, and a CentOS at a default.

When playing with the vApp, it took about 5-8 minutes to boot because of the all the standard services set to boot. That was the first thing that needed to be fixed. Second, customizations needed to happen. vCloud Director does a good job at doing the customization because it's done natively. Once the customization is done it breaks the spring application because the apache server is hard coded to point to the TC+DB server. So I figured it needed a little bit of automation.

First, I turned off a bunch of un-needed services which most were taken from this page. Now the vApp boots in about 1 minute exactly. A much better turn around time. This time doesn't include customizations which takes another reboot. So calculate 1:30-2 minutes for total boot time.

I have compiled a list of free VMware vSphere tools that any administrator can use. I even made a Top 10 list out of that. But what about some more advanced tasks?

Look no further. I've created a collaboration of, yet again, FREE TOOLS for virtual machines within your VMware environment. All of the tools in this package were pooled together for performing advanced tasks to optimize performance, reclaim lost space, and clean up your virtual machine. The goal of this project was to mount the ISO to your VM and run the scripts or tools that are packaged. Of course not all of these tools will run from a VM, but most can. I do not want to take any credit for any of the programs or scripts packaged. I simply took the time to place all of them in one spot. Take a moment to thank the creators of scripts and programs that I have linked within every ReadMe in every folder.