If the title didn't give it away already, starting November 8th, I'll be joining VCE/Acadia as a vArchitect (Sr. Technical Consultant). I'm honored to be joining the likes of Trey Layton, Justin Guidroz, and Aaron Delp on this new venture. In my new role, I'll be responsible for the Vblock architecture and being an expert on the subject matter. I'm very excited about deep diving into UCS, storage offerings from EMC, and getting into more services from VMware that all run on Vblock. I believe this new opportunity suits me well and I'm excited to see what life is like on the other side of the table.

Don't expect the focus of my blog to change, in fact, expect it to get even better. I'll be getting the chance to go hands on with 3 of the top technologies that are changing the data center everyday. You can expect some small write-ups on UCS, EMC storage, and even more goodness on VMware products. Since I need to be a VMware expert for what will run on Vblock, I'm excited to start becoming more proficient in vCD, View, and SRM. My first week on the job will be Vblock Week, so I'll get my hands dirty real fast. The thrill about this new venture has been building up for quite some time and I'm happy to be joining the coalition.

We all know and love Veeam because it truly is an innovative product with lots of great features. I upgraded to Veeam v5 in hopes that one little tid-bit would be fixed, File Level Restore (FLR).

Currently, our company's veeam backup server runs on a Windows Server 2008 R2 VM. After having Veeam running for 8 days, we finally got a ticket that said we needed to restore a file back on our file share server. Ok, no problem. I fire up Veeam B&R, drill down to the file, browse to the folder and replace the deleted file. 2 minutes later I get an angry email about the file being READ-ONLY and how this should never happen, blah blah blah.

I noticed that the permissions weren't being copied over. I did some research and saw this Veeam Forum post http://ow.ly/30snx using the Microsoft KB article here: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/310316. But this fix only applies to Windows 2003 and XP.

My google feed for the keywords "vmware" usually has a bunch of junk come through, but I saw this headline and got involved to start reading right away, Zenoss Announces Free Tool for VMware Power Users with Esxtop. That keyword stuck out again, Free. If you're not familiar with Zenoss, it's a great infrastructure monitoring and performance piece of software. The Zenoss Core is a free product, but has the option to pay for support and subscription. Zenoss has plugins called Zenpacks that give you insight into different types of infrastructure. These Zenpacks are built for specific pieces of hardware or software to get deeper monitoring.

Today, Zenoss announced a free Zenpack that does performance monitoring looking at ESXTOP statistics. From the description: The VMWare ESX Server ZenPack for Core allows you to monitor ESX hosts and guests via VMWares Esxtop utility. The ZenPack uses the resxtop command to gather performance information about VMware Infrastructure™ ESX™ servers. Hold your horses, there are a few prerequistes that need to be installed to get this feature working correctly if you are a current Zenoss user. You must have Zenoss v3.0, the OpenSSL dev package, the ZenPacks.zenoss.ZenossVirtualHostMonitor at version 2.3.5, and finally the VMware vSphere CLI is required for access to the resxtop command. You can find all the installation instructions at the 17.2 Prerequisites Page. If you are new to Zenoss, ESX Zenpack comes preinstalled with the latest release of Zenoss Core.

While in Copenhagen for VMworld Europe 2010, I was invited to be a guest on a weekly podcast called vChat. If you're not familiar with vChat, it's usually hosted by three regulars in the industry, David Davis, Simon Seagrave, and Eric Siebert. Eric wasn't able to make it to Copenhagen, so David and Simon invited Duncan Epping (yellow-bricks.com) and myself to be special guests. We talked about our sessions, the city, and some of the really cool things we plan on seeing out of VMware in the future. It's a short video, about 20 minutes, so enjoy.

The days are counting down to Halloween and I figured I would share what's going on. First, a new meme started popping up. ZombieVM.org is a new site that popped up out of this Halloween spirit. The motto is "we will take over your resource capacity and destroy your performance". Second, I have to share what's going on with my street for Halloween Decorations.

What ZombieVM.org describes a Zombie VM as: Powered-on virtual machines that hapless systems administrators have forgotten about and no one uses anymore. While we hide in the shadows of your virtualized infrastructure, we suck away your CPU, memory, storage, and throughput. The resources we feed on destroy your data center ROI and wreak havoc on VM performance.

What's a Zombie VM to admins that causes more headaches and support requests than performance issues?

• A Zombie VM can be a failed virtual machine, but vCenter shows it as running and using the Power Off or Reboot options freezes the process, sometimes getting stuck at 95%
• A Zombie VM can be a running virtual machine on an ESX host, but isn't being shown in vCenter or the vSphere client.
• A Zombie VM can be a running virtual machine that is shown as running in vCenter but you can't open a console to it, yet it's functioning properly.
• A Zombie VM can be a virtual machine that is sitting in your datastore, but not registered with vCenter, just eating up space.

It's been a year and a half since I joined my current company. During this time, I've grown a lot and experienced new things. This company has given a lot to me and I can't thank them enough. That being said, I'm moving forward with my career and joining a great company at the beginning of November. I can't say who I'm joining just yet, I'll save that for another post. The real meat of this post is that I really need to fill my position and fast.

If you're in the Louisville, KY/Southern IN area and looking for a change of pace, please keep reading. The position calls for a Network Engineer, primarily VMware and Cisco skills, with concentration on Windows Administration to follow. The bulk of your job is spent doing daily administration tasks and taking the lead on infrastructure management projects. You will also be the in-house expert on all things VMware and Cisco, with a concentration on vSphere, Cisco ASA, and Cisco Layer 3 and Layer 2 technologies. 2nd level support is about 5% of your time when the level 1 people need some expertise assistance. You'll get a chance to get your hands on a NetApp FAS SAN for the virtual infrastructure, as well as Veeam for backing up all our critical data. I've done alot of the heavy lifting, so there are only 2 more P2V's until this environment is 100% virtualized. In hopes to wet your appetite a bit more, let me tell you some of the great benefits about joining this company

We've been having a great time here in Copenhagen for VMworld Europe. I think after this week, I'm a bit vBurntOut. In San Francisco, it was great meeting all kinds twitterati, and I've been lucky enough to meet everyone on the other half of the world. Way to many to name but it's been a real pleasure. I have to give my many thanks to Xangati for sponsoring my flight, and David Davis for putting up with my late night antics in the hotel room. Meeting new bloggers from around the country has been great because we have been bouncing ideas off of each other for new posts and  future ventures over a few beers..ok, a lot of beers

This blog is in response to a few questions I have and I would like to hear your opinions.

This past week I took the time to put my VMworld.com account to use and listen to some sessions. I took an hour to listen to EA6705 Best Practices for Virtualizing Active Directory. After listening to Chris Skinner, Sr. Program Manager-Worldwide Education, VMware, Inc, for an hour I had a better understanding of how to go about a best practice.

• TIME! this should always be on your radar when virtualizing AD. Chris makes some good suggestions about using registry hacks or even using VMware tools to sync your virtualized AD server.
• Make sure this VM always has enough CPU cycles to the clock can be updated. If your servers are strained for resources, and your AD server has to sit back and wait for a CPU cycle, there is a chance that the time sync may go off and things can go haywire in your environment.
• There was some heat between Gabe and Christian Mohn on this subject that you can read below. But "best practice" is to never do a P2V of your DC
  • Gabe's - Virtualizing a domain controller, how hard can it be?
  • Christian's - P2V a Domain Controller? Why would you?