Last night, I was invited by Cody Bunch (@cody_bunch) from ProfessionalVMware.com to exhibit my home lab for a series of VCAP related questions. Cody has a series of brown bag podcasts for VCP and VCAP study sessions.

A few weeks ago, Cody posted this article VCAP DCA Voucher Give Away – Round 2, Live Lab and I put my name in the drawing. I was the lucky chosen one (the only one  ) to exhibit my live lab in front of a few audience members. I had to prove the following:

The Lab

Scenario:

Your company has purchased 3 servers and an iSCSI SAN as an additional production cluster. As administrator you must complete the following tasks:

• Configure the hosts for availability and resource distribution
• Enable future growth for the hosts
• Enable power savings
• Ensure the configuration of all hosts is consistent and auditable
• Configure iSCSI to support production work loads
• In addition to iSCSI, you must also support an HA Web network segment

The VMworld 2011 Call for Papers is now live! If you have a VMworld.com account (it's free), you can watch the Top 4 rated sessions from VMworld 2010. I was surprised and shocked when David Davis showed me that we were ranked #3 on the top rated sessions. Thank you to everyone that took the time to submit your thoughts and opinions.

Without further ado sign in to your VMworld.com account, click on Top Rated Sessions From VMworld 2010, and click on MA8339 which featured David Davis and I talking about the Top 10 Free tools. If you are already signed in to your VMworld account, then just click here.

Yesterday, a bunch of the vExperts got a briefing on the release of vCenter Operations. I'm a known fan boy for VMware, but this product is probably on the bottom of my list. Please note that I have not had the time to test this product yet, this is just an opinion of mine from yesterday's briefing.

Take a read at Eric Sloof's article vCenter Operations – Your Future Performance Dashboard so you can get an understanding of what it has to offer. Done yet? OK, let's continue.

vCenter Operations has a few things going for it. Remember, that this wasn't a completely in-house product from the ground up. This was an acquisition of Integrien and has bits and pieces of Ionix thrown in. First, the deployment method. VMware is really starting to kick the tires on the Appliance model and this is the first product released that shows it in the wild (you will see more to come). Unlike other competitors, there is no windows based install so you're not burning up a license and the integrated database makes it good for small to medium sized deployments.

opvizor has been released in RC and is currently accessible as a free SaaS solution. According to this press release, "opvizor identifies issues in virtualized environments before they can lead to loss of performance or support cases...opvizor is now offering a broad spectrum of functions – such as for instance reports, dashboard and the support of an unlimited number of hosts. In addition, early issue detection has been expanded broadly. opvizor can be downloaded free of charge from www.opvizor.com for real-life testing in your own VMware environment."

After a few months of work, Brian Suhr from virtualizetips.com has released the 1st edition of his new magazine. There are some great topics including an article from yours truly talking about my green vSphere Home Lab.

The magazine is in PDF form so you can enjoy it offline on your iPad. Download it from either here or here.

In a series of blog posts, I'm going to be covering some of the basics that people just happen to overlook. Let's forget about cloud and look back to the real reason why we started virtualizing in the first place, the virtual machine. The virtual machine is key component to cloud, but having machines that are lean and clean allow greater density and better performance.

Today I'm going to be examining placement the placement of virtual machines that need to talk to each other and how to configure their DRS (Distributed Resource Scheduler) settings. The great thing about virtualization and DRS is that virtual machines can be on any number of ESX(i) hosts and we never have to think about it. Have you ever thought about virtual machines that are tied to a specific application and constantly need to talk to each other? You can greatly improve the performance of your application by placing the VMs that contain an Application on the same host. Let's examine Figure 1.

A few weeks ago at geek week, I was assigned the task of getting the Cisco Nexus 1000v distributed virtual switch set up. I probably spent a good 4 hours on my first cluster because I had no clue what was going on and I ended up losing my management network and spent lots of time restoring my network to the original vSwitch. I followed TrainSignal's 1000v Installation training in Pro Series Vol. 1 but the Nexus 10000v setup has changed a bit since then. It has actually gotten much easier. After finding a few walk throughs and talking to rock star Jason Nash, I was able to setup my 2nd cluster in less than 10 minutes. I'll show you the easiest step by step instructions I can possibly do.

There are a few prerequisites to understand before we get started.

1. VSM = Virtual Supervisor Module which is the "brains" or the engine on a Cisco switch. This is an .ovf that is deployed as a VM into our cluster. We are going to setup 2 of these for HA purposes
2. VEM = Virtual Ethernet Module will be installed on the ESXi hosts through Update Manager.
3. Packet VLAN = Used for communication between the VSM and the VEMs within a switch domain by protocols such as CDP, LACP, and IGMP. Cisco recommends keeping this on it's own separate VLAN, but I would put Packet and Control on the same L2 VLAN.
4. Control VLAN = Used to send VSM configuration commands to each VEM, VEM notifications to the VSM, and NetFlow exports. Cisco recommends keeping this on it's own separate VLAN, but I would put Packet and Control on the same L2 VLAN.
5. Management VLAN = The management interface is not used to exchange data between the VSM and VEM, it is used to establish and maintain the connection between the VSM and VMware vCenter Server. Needs to be on a routable VLAN that can communicate with the vCenter Server.

After attending my first PEX show, I can't wait to attend the next. The atmosphere at PEX is a lot different than what you see at VMworld. PEX was by far one of the most professional conferences I've attended. When I wasn't running around on con-calls, I was part of the booth staff for VCE and it amazed me that when the show floor first opened, there was never a mad dash for SWAG (stuff we all get). Everyone was more interested in actually hearing about the products that could benefit them as a partner and what they could take back to their customers. It was great to talk Vblock with people that want to become VCE partners and educate people on a lot of the technology and value Vblock brings to the table.