Today is a day worth celebrating. John Troyer is a social media icon at VMware. John is responsible for the weekly VMTN podcasts, the Planet V12N RSS feed, and the famed vExpert Program. Today is also John's birthday.
John's dedication is valuable to all of us that partake in VMware's social media presence. I've been fortunate enough to talk to John several times and it's always a fun time. Even though my neck may hurt from looking up because John is like 9 feet tall! 
Next week on July 28th, make sure you make the trip to Indianapolis IN for the 4th annual VMware User Group Demo Days! This is a fantastic event that truly feels like a mini VMworld.
This is no ordinary VMUG. There will be some great sessions with some great speakers as well: David Davis, Scott Lowe, Mike Laverick, and Vaughn Stewart to name a few! There are also going to be hands on labs, food, and more! I do have to say thank you to Frank Seal, an organizer for this event, who asked me to be a speaker as well a few months back.
When I first started testing vSphere 5 in my home lab, I began from scratch. One of the steps that was relatively familiar was binding VMKernal adapters to the physical NICs for iSCSI use.
If you have NICs that have iSCSI offload capabilities without having to use the Software iSCSI Adapter, then you are used to using a command similar to this:
esxcli swiscsi nic add -n vmk2 -d vmhba34
You can watch more on it here How to configure iSCSI Port Binding on vSphere 4
A few days ago I posted vCenter 5 - To Appliance or Not? talking about using the virtual appliance. I'm glad that article has been popular because it's a very important decision to make as you move forward with vSphere 5. As I move forward with my choice of using the original Windows installer, here are some design considerations to keep in mind.
During my beta testing for vSphere 5, i stuck the vCenter ISO into my existing vCenter and started going install crazy. I upgraded vCenter to version 5, installed auto-deploy, log collector, web services, update manager, and the whole shabang. It wasn't until one day when I had to reboot my vCenter VM that everything became clear. Upon reboot, my vCenter service failed to start.
I took a gander at the logs thinking it would be a DB miscommunication and there was an entry with something along the lines of failure to lock a socket. It makes perfect sense. vCenter services depend on port 80 and I installed vCenter Web Services which also defaults to port 80. Since vCenter Web Services was already in use of port 80, the service wouldn't start. I stopped all the IIS services and restarted the vCenter service and all was well again. Therefore, I started to think of what the best design practice should be for vCenter components.
The virtual distributed switch is making great leaps and bounds. Here are some of the new features with screen shots.
The big news has struck, vCenter now becomes as a virtual appliance! Who's ready to take the plunge? I know I'm certainty not. I feel that you should hold off on deploying the vCenter linux based appliance in an enterprise production environment for now. Let's go through some of the pros and cons.
The vSphere 5 release brings some really cool new things into the mix. High Availability has been completely revamped and enhanced. Forget everything you remember about "aam" because it's being replaces with Fault Domain Manager.
VMware is taking a page out of it's own book by extending the VMware heartbeat signal from hosts pinging each other through VMkernel ports to now being able to keep in communication through datastores. If you're not familiar already, vCloud Director cells keep in contact with each other through datastores so it's another layer of resiliency.
If you haven't been following your twitter stream this morning, then you wouldn't have seen the mass amount of people being nominated for vEXPERTs. There are a lot of new faces to the crowd and still the same great people as well.
I was fortunate enough to be given this award for the second year in a row and will continue my efforts to keep this status.
Dear Kendrick Coleman,
We're pleased to designate you as a vExpert 2011 as recognition of your contributions to the VMware, virtualization, and cloud computing communities. You’ve done work above and beyond, and we’re delighted to communicate more closely, to share resources, and to offer other opportunities for greater interaction throughout the year as we continue to grow knowledge and success in the community of IT professionals. Welcome to the vExpert 2011 Program!
This week i'm taking a Global Knowledge course called Implementing Cisco Switched Networks to prepare for the CCNP SWITCH exam. The class has been pretty good after day 1 with a lot of refreshers talking about vlans, private vlans, trunks, and etherchannel/lacp.
In a vSphere environment, setting up network trunks is very important. It's what allows multiple VLANs to traverse the same wire and it's fairly easy to setup. In most of my configurations I never worry about setting up the native vlan because 99% of the time it works without setting it. That's where I found out I've been making a big mistake all along.
When you setup a trunk link and do not add the native vlan command to the configuration, a native vlan is actually done for you behind the scenes using vlan 1. This is a concern for many reasons because many other protocols traverse the network on vlan 1 such as Virtual Trunking Protocol (VTP). Also, a best practice is to change VTP to Transparent during initial configuration because by default, switches come in Server mode. VTP can ruin your day if you're not paying attention.
Back in May I posted an article about VMTurbo releasing a new free virtual appliance called Performance and Efficiency Reporter. Yesterday, I took the 10 minutes to actually get this puppy up and running and I'm actually very pleased to see the results.
At first, I thought to myself, how good is this actually going to be? After just 1 night of letting the appliance do its job and collect statistics, I'm very happy with the turnout. And come to find out, it works with Free ESXi as well! This is a great tool to have some reports emailed either to yourself or your managers every morning so you can see what yesterday's virtual environment looked like. The Host/VM Resource Utilization Heatmap is the best report out of all of them because it's a summary of what is out there. If you have a large environment, I would think this report could get a bit bulky.
Here are all the reports you have access to once it runs after 1 night...
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