Not a tech post, just FYI :)

I know i'm a day late, but i figured you wanted to see all the good stuff. As many of you are probably aware, I'm a pretty big halloween fanatic. I moved into my house about 4 years ago and began accumulating more and more decor. I never would have found an exciting hobby like this if it wasn't for the neighborhood I live in. You know how some streets or neighborhoods go all out with christmas lights? Well, our street does that for Halloween each year. It's one of the largest neighborhood gatherings in the US and it takes place right here in Louisville, KY. It's called Halloween on Hillcrest. It's a big deal to the residents who partake in the fun. So much so, that this year we had somewhere between 1500-2000 trick-or-treaters. Yes, you read that correctly, over one thousand and five hundred. This years festivities were not as big as the previous years, but that is perfectly fine by me. We needed it to soften  just a little bit. Besides, the real fun is 2 weeks leading up to Halloween when friends and family come over and we can just have a beer on the porch. The night of Halloween is pure chaos and handing out candy is like being in an assembly line.

Without futher ado, here are some pictures. This is a public facebook link so all 150+ pictures should be viewable. the first 70-80 are houses on the street, the 2nd half are from Halloween night. My house is the "torture chamber" theme so it won't be hard to miss. Hope everyone had a fun and safe halloween!

2012 Halloween on Hillcrest Decorations

Over the past few weeks, I had the pleasure of being a technical reviewer for TrainSignal's new VMware vCloud Director Organizations course. The author of this course is Jake Robinson (@jakerobinson), who is a well known vCloud Guru who works for the vCloud Partner, Bluelock. So what's this new course all about?

First off, this is NOT a vCloud Install, Manage, and Configure tutorial. This course does not take you through the setup and installation of vCloud Director, but instead focuses on what end-users of the cloud will interface. Have you ever accessed the vCloud Director portal and have been completely lost on where to start? Think about this. If you plan on creating a cloud setup for consumption, do you really want to spoon feed every single person that wants to procure cloud resources? Or train the organizational admins for different departments or in the case of SPs, every tenant? Absolutely Not.

This course will help end users and organizational admins understand the rights, controls, and power they each possess inside of vCloud. Every type of user will be different and each needs to know the functionality inside of vCloud Director. This course will lend itself to self-teaching end users how to create vApps from a catalog, publish vApps to a catalog, understand the types of networks available to them, be able to create their own vApp networks, administer the hardware on created VMs, perform their own system customizations, and much more. In fact, Jake even goes deep by showing how to use the vCloud API and PowerCLI cmdlets to script many common things in vCloud Director. I have a feeling we will see Jake come up with more automation courses for the future because these are really cool and gets you started on the ground floor.

One of the most valuable lessons in this series is Lesson 6. We've all read plenty of blogs trying to understand vCloud Director networking with diagrams. But this lesson finally puts the diagrams away and lets you see what happens when you use each type of network with use cases as well. It's a terrific lesson for all those who are still a little "cloudy" about the whole concept.

Head on over to TrainSignal to order your copy today

I've had my fair share of problems with getting this technology working correctly. So let's get going. I have to say thanks to Sachin Thakkar over at VMware for helping me get this puppy rolling.

First thing is first, multicast. I'm not a CCIE, heck I'm not even a very good CCNA anymore. But you need to understand that multicast plays a major role within VXLAN. To simplify things, multicast is like a TV broadcast. There is a provider airing a station and users tune in and out at various times to get the content they want. Start reading about IP Multicast. It will probably take you a week to fully understand it, but enough jibber jabber, let's configure.

For my purposes, I'm lucky enough to be able to test this functionality with a Vblock 700MX connected to a pair Nexus 7010 switches (hell of a lab).

One HUGE gotcha here is that it is best to configure most of these parts before you add vShield Manager to vCloud Director during the setup.

There are some pre-requisites you need to get from your network team for VXLAN functionality:

1 Layer 3 VLAN configured with the following parameters:

IGMP Snooping enabled

IGMP Querier Address assigned

Default gateway for this VLAN

DHCP Helper Address to your DHCP server

DHCP scope for this VLAN

I totally meant to get this out a few days ago but am now finally catching up. During the beta testing period, I had all kinds of problems getting 5.1 working. Come to find out, Synology DSM is not compatible with vSphere 5.1 with BOTH iSCSI and NFS. I HAVE NOT had a chance to test the GA version, but build 732143 which is a beta build along with the beta of DSM 4.1, experienced this issue. This has also been confirmed by Jason Nash and Jeremiah Dooley, so I know it's not just me.

It's possible to mount both NFS and iSCSI datastores, but when you try to build or power on a VM, everything begins to halt when it needs to write to disk. If everything runs in memory (like mounting an ISO and beginning an OS installation) it looks like it's working, but when it comes to install the OS to disk, it begins to crawl. I checked the vmkernel log and here is what is shown. You can see that after I power on the VM, it gets binded to a port but when it tries to read from disk, there are all sorts of errors:

As many of you are aware, I keep a running list of free VMware vSphere Tools. Mattias Sundling from VKernel/Quest sent out a newsletter the other week with a new competition. The premise is this... "got a free tool idea? win a cool prize!"

So go ahead and submit your ideas today and you could win a mac mini, ipad, or Apple TV.

During the beta process I created a few videos to demonstrate how easy it is to use the new vSphere Web Client. These videos were created during the beta period so some things might have changed. I have demonstrated the entire process of setting up the entire vSphere environment strictly through the vSphere Web Client and never touching the C# client. Enjoy!

This is a second post from the other blog post that I put out this morning called vSphere 5.1 vCenter Virtual Appliance and vSphere Web Client Video Tutorial Series.

In this video I look at a bunch of new features of vSphere 5.1 that can be seen from the new vSphere Web Client. Enjoy!

Xangati has released a new feature to their product set called the storm tracker. This allows more visibilitiy into the infrastructure. After seeing this for the first time, it was pretty cool. it integrates all the cool Xangati features such as the DVR functionality but also brings in WMI integration. So think about this. A storm is present, you can see that it's on host 05 in your cluster, you can see that its on VM-X, but what caused that problem? WMI integration now lets you playback the recording and actually see the windows process that was running that attributed to the storm. pretty cool. They will be at VMworld so definitely go check them out! Here is there Press Release