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.

With vSphere 5 comes a new virtual machine hardware version... version 8. The vCPU configuration has changed a bit in the new layout and you can totally see why. When creating a new VM, or editing virtual machine hardware, you can now choose a virtual socket and core allocation to the VM instead of just choosing a "vCPU count".

The amount of vCPU's you can distribute is based on the amount of physical cores available on the host. For instance, I have a single Quad Core Intel chip on each of my home lab servers. That means a VM can be configured with up to 4 available vCPUs in an array of different options. Why would VMware do this?? For application licensing of course! If you have an application that needs some horsepower but is licensed by the socket, no difference if it is virtual or physical, you can get around that by applying multiple cores to a single socket. Think about the money you could save moving from a 12 vCPU VM in vSphere 4 with 12 licensed sockets to a single vCPU socket with 12 cores in vSphere 5!

OK... I swear this is THE LAST blast of RSS crap.

I have had people complaining of the double posts on RSS feeds so here is my attempt at a standard.

Please disregard my previous post on changing RSS feeds. I had no clue about Feedburner and that's where I'm building the new feed. This is the LAST blog post that will go out on all Syndicates so you may have double posts on this one too. Please make sure your RSS feed is updated and pointing towards my new feedburner address:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/KendrickColeman

Hey Everyone. I've gotten lots of complaints lately about my postings showing up twice in some people's RSS feeds. I think I have solved the problem. It existed because I had two syndicates on here and that was causing the double postings.

I have removed one of them and am now using the default & native Joomla syndicate that can be found in the upper right hand corner on the home page which has replaced the old syndicate. Some people might be using the old RSS feed address, but that has now been removed. To continue getting RSS feed updates make sure you are pointing to only ONE of these addresses:

CHANGED!!

http://feeds.feedburner.com/KendrickColeman

http://kendrickcoleman.com/index.php?/feed/rss.html
or
http://kendrickcoleman.com/index.php?/feed/atom.html

EDIT 9/26/2013--- REALTEK DRIVERS ARE NO LONGER A PART OF VSPHERE 5.5!! If you would like to integrate the Realtek Drivers in the ESXi 5.5 ISO, please follow Erik's article -  Adding Realtek R8168 Driver to ESXi 5.5.0 ISO

I've had this one backlogged but finally got around to test it out. In my home lab, I am using the Shuttle SH55 that has a Realtek 8111E 1Gb on-board NIC.

Surprisingly enough, I see google keywords coming to my site to look at my homelab using the keywords Realtek and vsphere. With vSphere 4, there were some articles that I highlighted in my home lab post that pointed towards vm-help.com that used a new oem.tgz to inject Realtek drivers into the ESXi installer. The problems with injecting the oem.tgz drivers is that it wasn't native and was prone to problems. When I had a VM using that NIC with vSphere 4.1, pings were lost and things seemed to just disappear. Thus, I made the decision to skip out on using the on-board NIC and continued to use the Intel NICs that are on the HCL.

Well, the good news is that the Realtek NIC is working with vSphere 5 build 381646 (beta build). The bad news is that the vSphere HCL hasn't been updated for vSphere 5 so who knows if it's really supported.

It was almost 1 year ago today that I published my VCAP4-DCA Landing Page. Back on July 16th, I finally got around to taking my VCAP4-DCA exam after the struggle with my VCAP Madness and accidentally passing the VCAP4-DCD.

It took exactly 9 business days to get the email from the certification team, and they do a good job with scaring the crap out of you. The email reads as such:

Hello,

Thank you for participating in the VMware Certified Advanced Professional program.  Please find your VCAP4-DCA score report attached.

Kind Regards,
The VMware Technical Certification Team

Wow! How scary is that? They make you open an attachment to see if you passed! Loading the PDF is the most nervous 3 seconds of your life, but it's worth the wait when you see that word "PASS". Whew...

I was in the midst of getting a few play VMs setup for my nested vCloud Director 1.5 environment and I ran into something new. I grabbed 2 linux distros from bagside.com because all of the distros there are top notch and have VMware tools already installed which makes life much easier.

These machines won't boot up because they were created with VMware Workstation. I have the vCenter Converter 5 public beta (which i highly suggest checking out) that can convert virtual machines while automatically upgrading them to HW v8. After the conversion, I looked at the virtual hardware and saw a new piece called "HD Audio".