As everyone knows, the Top 25 virtualization blog voting machine is now open for business. This is NOT another "vote for me" post. I don't want to act like a selfish single child who needs more attention. Instead, this post is to encourage you to just go vote. More and more virtualization blogs are popping up everyday and these individuals put in a lot of work into sharing their knowledge with the world. Bloggers spend more time than you would think whiteboarding ideas or taking tons of screenshots to show you step by steps to spark your interests. It's almost a second job to many.

There is a great quote from the movie Contagion that i find amusing "Blogging is not writing, it's just graffiti with punctuation." There are so many blogs out there that it's very hard to find the few golden nuggets out of the mess written on the walls. The best blogs are consistently the best because they have the greatest content and make it amusing and fun for their readers. You only get 10 votes, so sort through the 100+ blogs, and choose the ones that consistently bring you back to want and read more. It means a lot to get votes from readers. I always love reading the emails that start with "Hey Kenny, i was reading your blog and..."

Someone call the n00b patrol because this one should have been a no-brainer. I was working with a customer today and their default image inside of vCloud Director is a Windows 2008 R2 VM with 1vCPU and 4GB of RAM. Whenever they deployed a new VM from vCloud Director, it would take approximately 45 minutes to complete the entire sysprep process and boot up. After that 45 minute process, when they tried to use that VM, it was almost unbearable through the web UI because it was so slow. The CPU performance was just outright horrible.

After a few quick conversations, I did a bit of troubleshooting to narrow it down to a vCloud problem. I used the same exact image and deployed it from template on a blade used for vCloud resources. It also deployed on the same datastore so we could cancel out the hardware issue. Sysprep ran, and the VM was created and ready for use after 4-7 minutes. So it was definitely a problem in vCloud.

I opened up the vSphere Client to the vCloud vCenter and started looking at the VM that was spun up from vCloud Director under the resources tab. This should have been as clear as day to point out. The VM has a limit set on it of 260MHz.

So the title is technically inaccurate. Everything has to traverse a VLAN, and if no VLAN is specified, then you're riding on VLAN 1.

I volunteered to build some Hands On Labs for our technical sales folks and I was in charge of creating the Nexus 1000v Lab. After battling a few quirks for about 7 hours, I was finally able to get everything functioning correctly. The networking piece didn't take 7 hours, but the lab was convoluted enough that I will save you from reading about it.

The lab consisted of running the latest software:

• vCenter 5 Build 455964
• 2x Nested ESXi Servers running 5.0 Build 504890
• Nexus 1000v VSM 4.2(1) SV1(4a)
• Nexus 1000v VEM 201108271-BG

another webinar about free tools??! oh yeah! David Davis and I are once again presenting our infamous VMworld presentation. I don't have to talk about it any more. Just know that since this is being sponsored by TrainSignal there will be some vSphere 5 Training Give Aways, which is always fun.

It's taking place on Wednesday 1/11/2012 at 3:00pm EST. Hope to see you there!

Register Here! - download here

Recently, my virtual Zeus load balancer wouldn't boot up properly so I figured I would just rebuild it. Come to find out, I couldn't remember everything I did to get it working properly so now I'm documenting it for anyone else that may want to do this. Zeus Load balancer is a great free utility that was recently acquired by Riverbed Technologies and is now labeled as the Riverbed Stingray Traffic Manager. It's a good product for home labbers because it will do SSL HTTPS load balancing which works great for vCloud or View testing. Check out Chris Colotti's post Load Balancing Considerations for vCloud.

To get the product, sign up for a Zeus/Riverbed Developer Account. You will be emailed a username and password and will get access to the downloads area and see these files below:

I'm amazed every day by the amount of effort people in VCE contribute. VCE has that VMware Labs feel to it. If you see a hole that needs to be filled, go fill it. Do you have an idea that you want to make into a project, run with it. It's innovation and ideas that keep things moving forward.

Today, VCE released a new tool for its customers called the Vblock Version Tool. This program will allow a partner/customer to gather all the required firmware/software level versions on their Vblock and compare it against the Official Release Matrix.  If you don't know, the Official Release Matrix is a chart/martix/pdf that gets updated about once or twice a quarter (depending on how many and what types of firmwares are released) and plays into VCE's strategy of a Pre-Integrated & Pre-Tested Product. Every component in the Vblock (Storage, UCS, VMware, MDS, Nexus, 1000v, PowerPath V/E, UIM, etc) all have some sort of firmware or software level tied to them. VCE's goal is to release a product that adheres to specific firmware/software levels to ensure complete interoperability and superior performance. The Official Release Matrix contains all the software/firmware levels for specific Vblock models and can be found internally on VCE Portal or partners can get it on VCE Partner Portal.

The Vblock Version Tool shows the continued effort VCE makes in building the industry's ONLY integrated stack with true differentiating characteristics.  VCE is continuing to help customers realize the value in Vblock above and beyond the best of breed hardware components. The VCE Vblock Version Tool can be found on the VCE Partner Portal and customers can get the tool from VCE Support Portal.

I got a request internally for a simple step-by-step of how to deploy a vApp or VM from vCloud Director because the IT group has no experience with vCloud. I toiled on putting this blog article up because the simplicity is just, well, simple. Thanks to a few twitterati (@P2Vme, @angeloluciani, @jmichelmetz, and @mtellin) for making me do it anyway. here we go

Before you begin, you need to know where to go. vCloud has a few different portals but there is going to be one defined for your particular organization. For instance, my vCloud Director instance rests at https://vcloud.kendrickcoleman.c0m/cloud/. This webaddress is for administrator access. When you create a new Organization inside vCloud Director such as Developer, you can create a new logon portal that can be accessed at https://vcloud.kendrickcoleman.c0m/cloud/org/Developer.

I received an email today from the product manager at VKernel asking about additional features the community would like in their free product SearchMyVM. If you're not familiar with SearchMyVM it can be described as a "google-like" interface for your vCenter environment. You can run queries against your environment, and do searches. It's an appliance based VM so you don't pay any licensing cost, and the product is absolutely free. It's a great way for admins to let other people in IT see what resources are being consumed and are free within the virtual environment. SearchMyVM has also been on my Top 10 Best Free Tools list. If you haven't checked it out, I encourage you to.

The product management wants to know what YOU would like to see in their new version. If you have any suggestions, please leave a comment or send me an email kendrickcoleman [@] gmail [dot] com and I'll relay it back to the team.