On my flight home from Boston, I started reading some of my VCAP Landing Page materials and found some cool things I never knew existed. Everything listed can be found in the ESX Configuration Guide and ESXi Configuration Guide for vSphere 4.1. These are all features that revolve about the security of vSphere hosts. The features don't have to be enabled, but they are all iinnherent to the operating system, giving vSphere an enhanced security profile.

Memory Hardening - The ESX/ESXi kernel, user-mode applications, and executable components such as drivers and libraries are located at random, non-predictable memory addresses. Combined with the non-executable memory protections made available by microprocessors, this provides protection that makes it difficult for malicious code to use memory exploits to take advantage of vulnerabilities.

Kernel Module Integrity - Digital signing ensures the integrity and authenticity of modules, drivers and applications as they are loaded by the VMkernel. Module signing allows ESXi to identify the providers of modules, drivers, or applications and whether they are VMware-certified.

Yesterday the twitterverse was filled with Vblock talk from some of the top people in the industry. That coupled with me getting out of Vblock week is what really sparked this post.

Vblock week was a gathering of #Team04, which included a handful of new vSpecialists but a majority crowd of vArchitects. The week was filled with talks from our fearless leader, Trey Layton, a lot of UCS cramming from Scott Lowe, getting our hands on UIM, getting more familiar with VMware View, knowing the offerings from RSA, and deep diving into Symmetrix and VMAX from David Robertson. This post isn’t geared at the technical offerings, the goal is to make you see the “true value” in Vblock.

A Vblock is a best of breed technologies union that enables a consumption of resources which we call cloud. If you are the techie person that wants to pick apart a Vblock and get into RAID levels or UCS blade configs, that’s awesome, but that’s not what Vblock is about.  Picture the Vblock as a whole, not a combination of products, but a single SKU that can provide a cloud solution. Are you getting the picture yet? Let’s dive a bit deeper.

If you're in the market for testing out some new vCloud Director 3rd party products, then go check out StratoGen. Here is the original message I received.

StratoGen are seeking experienced VMware users to join the StratoGen vCloud Beta Program which is based on VMware vCloud Director.

Beta testing is a crucial element in the cycle of our product releases, and we work closely with the VMware community to ensure our products are the best they can be.  vCloud Director is a powerful but complex product and as such we are seeking experienced users to provide informed feedback on our product offering.

By participating in the program you will be provided with resources on our enterprise platform enabling you to build, deploy and manage virtual machines, vApps and networks using the StratoGen vCloud Director portal. You will be contacted on a periodic basis for feedback.

While at VMworld San Francisco 2010, I was interviewed by Kasia from Train Signal (the leader in CBT Video Training). I must admit, she wrote some of the nicest things I've ever seen about me on the internet . Please take a moment and check it out Video: Interview with vExpert Kendrick Coleman at VMworld 2010

I've got to give credit to Train Signal for being one of the best vendors I've come in contact with. Train Signal gave me the opportunity to review the vSphere Pro Series Volume 2 DVD and I'm looking forward to seeing what they have coming down the pipeline. They have a lot of bright people on the team and it was great to meet David Davis, Matt Elias, Kasia Lorenc, and Gary Eimerman.

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.