Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator Service (MS DTC) enabled on all SQL nodes in the system

There's already some good blog posts out there, but none that are all inclusive. vCloud Automation Center (vCAC) 6.0 does not currently offer an automated migration path from vCAC 5.x or earlier versions. An automated migration path from vCAC 5.2 and 6.0 is planned for a future release in 2014. This will be focused on a fresh clean vCAC 6 installation.

We will be going through multiple steps for a successful deployment:

Part 1: Deploy and Configure the Identity Appliance

Part 2: Deploy and Configure the vCloud Automation Center Appliance

Part 3: Installing IaaS Components

Part 4: Tenant Configuration

Part 5: Agent, Endpoint, and Group Configuration

Part 6: Create and Publish Blueprints

Part 7 - Setup vCO, Endpoints, and Advanced Services

Preparing for the installation:

• vCloud Automation Center requires hosts to be identified using their fully qualified domain names (FQDN). DNS infrastructure is a necessity
• Have Available Resources
• Identity Appliance: 1vCPU, 2GB of RAM, 2GB of Disk
• vCAC Appliance: 2vCPU, 8GB of RAM, 30GB of Disk
• IaaS Server (Windows 2008 R2 SP1 or Windows 2012): 2vCPU, 8GB RAM, 30GB of Disk
• Requires SQL Database connection
• TCP/IP protocol enabled for MS SQL Server
• Microsoft Distributed Transaction Coordinator Service (MS DTC) enabled on all SQL nodes in the system
• No firewalls between Database Server and the Web server or IaaS Server, or ports opened as described in Port Requirements
• If using SQL Server Express, the SQL Server Browser service must be running
• .NET Framework 4.5
• PowerShell 2.0 or 3.0
• Internet Information Services 7.5
• We will be using an automation script to configure the pre-reqs for the Windows Box
• Verify NTP is functional across the domain
• I found it easier making sure that all hostname are entered in lowercase. this way there are DNS issues

JumpSquares.net was launched a few weeks ago and I'm very happy at the success and attention it has received. Almost 300 JumpSquares have been configured so far! 2 weeks ago I introduced a brand new functionality allowing you to access the server hosting the application via RDP, SSH, or VNC (read more at JumpSquares v1.1 - RDP, VNC, and SSH added to Server). With that new addition, I wanted to showcase it with a brand new video AND make the video 60% shorter than the original. Some new greatness, now only taking up 3 minutes and 43 seconds of your time. Head on over to the JumpSquares.net homepage to check it out and get registered, or view it below.

I know many of you are home lab junkies, and many of you out there replicated my home lab (VMware vSphere Home Lab - "The Green Machines"). This past week I made a dumb mistake. I completely jacked up my Active Directory server, and like a bad admin, I never took a backup and didn't even take a snapshot... Oh well, time to upgrade. Since everything was based on AD authentication, I came across many hiccups with security tokens and said 'screw it, start over'.

I took this as an opportunity to do a few things:

1. Upgrade the lab to vSphere 5.5
2. Upgrade Synology to DSM 4.3
3. Since I really jacked it up, I deleted almost every VM and began by building Active Directory on Windows 2012 R2.
4. I deleted my vCenter and SQL VMs and decided to make the plunge using the vCenter Virtual Appliance
5. I added a 120GB Kingston HyperX SSD drive to both of my Shuttle hosts
6. Rebuild VMware View with Horizon 5.3

So if you are wondering if stuff is working, I'm happy to say YES! 5.5 is fully working on my lab hosts. Thanks to Erik Bussink's article Adding Realtek R8168 Driver to ESXi 5.5.0 ISO I was able to get the on-board Realtek NIC to be seen which is helpful when migrating over to the distributed switch.

As a n00bie developer myself, it was pretty cool to see this in my mail this morning. The development team at VCE has created a public instance so developers don't have to roll their own appliance or use a production instance of Vision. Picture this, VMware creates an online version of vCenter so you can interact with the API without ever having to deploy something. That's exactly what we did but with VCE Vision. If you don't know what VCE Vision is...read here.

Go here to see all the details for the VCE Vision Simulator As A Service...

It's always something that we must account for, yet, we hardly act on it. It's a burden of time, money, and energy, yet, it's an absolute necessity. You know exactly what I'm talking about... Disaster Recovery.

During the phases of executing on your DR strategy, there are two very important metrics that you must determine

• Recovery Point Objective (RPO) - What's the amount of data loss that can be sustained?
• Recovery Time Objective (RTO) - How long will it take you to get those systems back up from your RPO?

The RPO phase is determined by business factors. The RTO is determined on the technical capability. In the past, the only real way to test your RTO was to actually execute it in a sandbox environment. Some of you may have VMware SRM which allows you to run a test. However, that test doesn't take into account tertiary VMs that aren't protected by SRM. What if you don't have SRM, how can you get a good baseline?

Today, PHDVirtual launched a new FREE tool called Recovery Time Actual calculator. It does exactly what you think it does, it will see how long it would take for all your virtual machines to spin up.

The Free RTA Calculator:

• Eliminates manual disaster recovery testing
• Produces the actual recovery time for a VM, or group of VMs, on VMware with minimal impact on your production environment
• Provides a fast and convenient way to estimate Recovery Time Objectives for Backup plans, Disaster Recovery plans, and SLA plans
• Enables periodic comparison of Recovery Time Actuals to Recovery Time Objectives
• Allows you to adjust your RTOs and SLAs over time as your environment grows and changes
• Can be run as often as required and under different production conditions, with any group of VMs to be estimated

How does it work? Very Simple actually:

1. Register and download the tool on to a Windows machine. No installation is necessary since it's just a simple executable
2. Connect the tool to your vCenter Server

just a quick funny short for this Monday AM. My Uncle Joe (UJ) came to town to visit my daughter and my parents started talking to him about this thing I do, which you are reading. For about 15 minutes he's going through and reading everything so I decided to capture a quick 30 second snippet while he wasn't paying attention. Can you imaging 15 minutes of this? Pretty funny stuff.

Last Friday I launched my latest project at http://www.jumpsquares.net. You can also download the appliance based version over at the project homepage.

After a few feature requests, I added some new functionality to allow RDP, VNC, and SSH connection to the "server" string. This new version is 1.1.

While configuring a JumpSquare, there are going to be two unique strings that are going to be configured. First is the Jump Location. The Jump Location is the web address you want the JumpSquare to re-direct to. In this case, I'm redirecting it to my vSphere Web Client login page. The next line is where I enter the server or location where this application is installed. For my purpose, my vCenter server is kcvcenter.kendrickcoleman.c0m (please only use the server name that can be resolved via DNS or you can use the IP address). After that I have the choice of selecting None, RDP, SSH, or VNC. Choosing one of these options will give me the ability to connect to kcvcenter.kendrickcoleman.c0m through that option. Since this is a Windows machine, I selected RDP.

I'm currently drafting a TOI for vSphere 5.5 and I'm going over every new feature in vSphere 5.5.

In the VMware vSphere 5.5 What's New PDF, it clearly states:

"vSphere 5.1 was the first vSphere release to provide support for hardware-accelerated 3D graphics—virtualgraphics processing unit (vGPU)—inside of a virtual machine. That support was limited to only NVIDIA-based GPUs. With vSphere 5.5, vGPU support has been expanded to include both Intel- and AMD-based GPUs. Virtual machines with graphic-intensive workloads or applications that typically have required hardware-based GPUs can now take advantage of additional vGPU vendors, makes and models. See the VMware Compatibility Guide for details on supported GPU adapters."

Upon reviewing the Compatibility Guide, only NVIDIA is supported on vSphere 5.1. Nothing has yet to be updated for vSphere 5.5