My Virtual Ramblings
Welcome to your lights-out datacenter! With vRealize Operation 6.6 automated workload balance is easier and more controllable than ever. This latest release of vRealize Operation gives you the ability to balance workloads across clusters and datastores, simple controls to govern how much balance you want based on your business needs, three ways to activate it The post Automated Workload Balance appeared first on VMware Cloud Management .
Resources for VMware NSX
NSX can be a beast to take in at once. However, as someone trying to get a handle on all that it has to offer, the article below has some great resources to get you started. No matter what level you are coming into this information at, you will no doubt be able to use these resources to get you started. And as with anything, practice makes perfect. So if you’re like me and learn by doing, then hop on over to VMware’s Hands On Labs site and get started with NSX.
VMware’s NSX, their Network Virtualization and Security platform is one of their hottest technology platforms. NSX is all about micro segmentation, a policy based method for ensuring resourc…
PowerCLI 6.5.1 Installation Walkthrough
We released PowerCLI 6.5.1 two weeks ago and the response has been incredible! The VMware.PowerCLI module is closing in on 4,000 downloads from the PowerShell Gallery and we’ve received a ton of good feedback. There seems to be quite a few questions and comments over this new installation method so I created a walkthrough video […] The post PowerCLI 6.5.1 Installation Walkthrough appeared first on VMware PowerCLI Blog .
Free e-learning course – VMware vSphere: What’s New Fundamentals [V6.0 to V6.5]
This course highlights the new features and enhancements in vSphere 6.5. It also presents use cases that describe how the new features align with customer needs.
Weathervane, a benchmarking tool for virtualized infrastructure and clouds – now open source!
Weathervane is a performance benchmarking tool developed at VMware. It lets you assess the performance of your virtualized or cloud environment by driving a load against a realistic application and capturing relevant performance metrics. You might use it to compare the performance characteristics of two different environments, or to understand the performance impact of some change in an existing environment.
What’s new for vSAN 6.6? [www.yellow-bricks.com]
Yes this may confuse you a bit, a new vSAN release namely vSAN 6.6 but it doesn’t coincide with a vSphere release. That is right, this is a “patch” release for vSphere but a major version for vSAN! It seems like yesterday that we announced 6.2 with Stretched Clustering and 6.5 with iSCSI and 2-Node Direct Connect. vSAN 6.6 brings some exciting new functionality and a whole bunch of improvements. Note that there were already various performance enhancements introduced in vSphere 6.0 Update 3 for vSAN 6.2. Anyway, what’s new for vSAN 6.6?
The debate between Homelaber’s recently has been SuperMicro vs Intel NUC. Both have pros and cons attached with them. I personally went with the Intel NUC for my homelab creating a single node vSAN. The article below gives a great run down of both systems for the homelab.
A couple of weeks ago I was talking to William Lam (http://www.virtuallyghetto.com/) and Alan Renouf (http://www.virtu-al.net/) about their exciting USB to SDDC demonstration, they were using an Intel NUC to deploy a VMware SDDC environment to a single node using VSAN. I offered them the opportunity to test out the same capability with one of my SuperMicro E200-8D servers and they took me up on the opportunity. Since then I have been approached by a number of people with requests for information about why I chose to go with the SuperMicro E200 for my home lab over the Intel NUC. I’ve never written a blog before but I thought this might be a good way to “cut out the middle man” so to speak. So here it goes, my reasons for why I chose the…Read More
Review: VMware vSphere gets much-needed facelift [networkworld.com]
vSphere 6.5 is easy to install, sports a new VM management console and takes a stab at Docker integration.
A while back we were charged with moving VMs to a new data center while also keeping downtime to a minimum. My team and I came up with a VM Delta Migration process to move a delta of the VM (basically the snapshot) so that we could keep the downtime short. The basic process was to take a snapshot, copy the VM to external media, and power it on. Then that media was shipped to the new DC to import. Once imported and ready, we shut down the VM again, SFTP the snapshot files, imported those into the new VM folder and powered on the VM. Once the VM was powered on and verified working, we were able to remove the snapshot. I’ve documented the process below for anyone that may be wanting to do something similar.
This article details the steps taken to perform the migration of a large VM in multiple parts – Part 1 is a bulk data copy, sent via physical media for large files. Part 2 is an incremental copy, to allow us to keep the VM available during this window. When the VM is imported at its new home, both parts should be combined.
Power off the VM, and create a snapshot.
Browse to the datastore that the VM is located in, and copy all files in the folder to the bulk storage destination. – Delete the VMWare.log files from the destination.
Power the VM back on, and ship the physical media over to the new location.
Once the media has been received, power the VM off again, and copy the following files over to the SFTP server:
At the new data center, copy the files from step 4 to the physical media from step 2. Overwrite any files that are duplicates.
Add all files from the physical media to a datastore, and import the VM using “Add to Inventory” on the .VMX file.
Power the VM online, and once everything is confirmed working, delete the snapshot.
I hope this helps anyone else needing a process to perform a migration of VMs between data centers while keeping downtime to a minimum.
First vSphere Client (HTML5) update in vSphere 6.5.0b! [VMware vSphere Blog]
With the release of vSphere 6.5.0b, we are proud to announce the first update to the vSphere Client!
