Tag Archives: VMware

VMware Mobile Knowledge Portal–iPad App

Do you find it hard to locate the latest VMware documentation ? Wouldn’t it be great if there was an iPad where the documentation and videos could be synchronized to your iPad enabling you to take it with you and learn on the train or wherever you need it. Want no more !

The VMware Mobile Knowledge Portal is now available and ready to download from the app store here: http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/vmware-mobile-knowledge-portal/id566387182

Once launched you can easily find the information relevant to you:

You can select the information you need to be synchronized to your device or watch it online when you have an internet connection:

Take the documentation with you:

Watch the technical videos and learn about the new 5.1 features:

vMotion and SvMotion Details with PowerCLI

4 Replies

Today I was asked if there was a way to list the vMotions and SvMotions which had occurred in an infrastructure, not only this but they needed to know which hosts the VMs had moved to, the reason for this was licensing.

Firstly they needed to confirm that certain VMs were firstly setup with DRSAffinityrules as disabled, this one was straight forward in PowerCLI:

Get-VM | Select Name, DRSAutomationLevel

Secondly they wanted a list of the vMotions and SvMotions which had taken place over the last week and specifically the source and destination hosts, a post on the VMware PowerCLI Blog gives us most of this information and was easy to adjust to include the source and destination hosts…

The adjusted script can be found below:

Function Get-MotionDuration {
    $events = Get-VIEvent -Start (Get-Date).AddDays(-7)
    $relocates = $events |
        where {$_.GetType().Name -eq "TaskEvent" -and $_.Info.DescriptionId -eq "VirtualMachine.migrate" -or $_.Info.DescriptionId -eq "VirtualMachine.relocate"}
    foreach($task in $relocates){
        $tEvents = $events | where {$_.ChainId -eq $task.ChainId} |
            Sort-Object -Property CreatedTime
        if($tEvents.Count){
            New-Object PSObject -Property @{
                Name = $tEvents[0].Vm.Name
                Type = &{if($tEvents[0].Host.Name -eq $tEvents[-1].Host.Name){"svMotion"}else{"vMotion"}}
                StartTime = $tEvents[0].CreatedTime
                EndTime = $tEvents[-1].CreatedTime
                Duration = New-TimeSpan -Start $tEvents[0].CreatedTime -End $tEvents[-1].CreatedTime
				SourceHost = $tEvents[0].Host.Name
				DestinationHost = $tEvents[-1].Host.Name
            }
        }
    }
}


Connect-VIServer MyViServer –User Administrator –Password “Pa$$w0rd”

Get-MotionDuration | FT -AutoSize

vCloud Suite 5.1– SSO Resources

SSO Videos

SSO Documentation

Install vCenter Single Sign On as Part of a vCenter Server Simple Install

Install vCenter Single Sign On as a New Installation

Install vCenter Single Sign On, vCenter Inventory Service, and vCenter Server Separately

SSO Frequently asked questions

List of great Knowledge Base articles from Justin King

vCloud Suite 5.1–Whats New?

Cloud Physics – Its Alive !

1 Reply

There’s a new kid on the VMware block and its Cloud Physics, they have just launched their website and also alpha system which you can sign up for. So who are they and what have they created ?

The who’s who of Cloud Physics includes some of the smartest people I have met, some great guys with not only fantastic ideas but also a history of work with many of the VMware features you are probably using right now.

Check out their about page for a list of people and probably some names you will recognize, and with that technical advisors list how can they fail ?!

What have they produced ?

Their opening beta product looks very impressive, it’s a scorecard based interface to your data providing metrics, logic and industry knowledge to the data from your own system.

Each score card shows your data and give you the information you need to do your job better, data that isn’t always easy to find in the vSphere Client can be displayed in seconds and shown in a relevant way to help system administrators concentrate on the issues or potential issues in their systems.

Try it out

As if there wasn’t enough of a reason to try their system out already, they just gave another one, and its big !

The guys at Cloud physics are also giving you a challenge, if you take part in their challenge you can win lots of shiny apple based products !

What do you have to do ? That’s the great bit, all you have to do is register on their site and start looking around, you will instantly start gaining points. To get more points you can suggest cards, or ways to make this more useful, some of these have already been created so take a look before adding your own.

Surely this is a win/win opportunity ? If you suggest a good idea they may implement it and it will save you time… Win1

If you get enough points you can win a prize…. Win2

You can use their system to look at your current data and often find problems and fixes you weren’t aware were there… Win3 !

I’m checking it out and making suggestions and I have to say, I’m impressed !

The first rule of #NotSupported is…..

3 Replies

This year VMworld is going to be awesome, I have seen some things which are going to blow your mind!

One thing I am really excited about is #NotSupported, this is a group of sessions which were the brain child of VMware’s Randy Keener (@VMRandy).

Historically people have done some cool things with VMware software, often things which it wasn’t designed for or is not supported by VMware. Randy has taken these fantastic use cases and added his own group of sessions at VMworld hosted by some of the experts from VMware and other companies and full of great information you didn’t know was possible.

Are you interested in nested ESXi Environments ?
What else can you do with the SRM SRA ?
Do you need help setting up your nested ESXi ?

To find out the answers to these questions and more come and listen whilst people like William Lam, Duncan Epping and many more tell you the amazing things that can be done with our software that is #NotSupported.

Where can I find these awesome sessions ?

Check out the Community Lounge at VMworld, the sessions will be hosted from 1pm – 3pm each day, for a schedule of the sessions visit this link below – make sure you add them to your calendars as you wont want to miss them, believe me! – More information will be added with the run up to VMworld.

#NotSupported Session List

The Rules

Installing vCloud Adapter for vCenter Operations Manager

4 Replies

I had to go through the installation of the vCloud Adapter into vCenter Operations Manager today and although the steps are in the doc I couldn’t get it to work, I ended up following Kendrick Coleman’s post here, although this worked I was later informed there was a much easier way to do this.

Randy Keener who works for DevOps at VMware showed me how to do it the correct (and easier) way, as I was going through this again so I thought I would take some screen shots to make things easier for anyone else who is unable to follow documentation like me !

What’s needed

vCloud Director 1.5.0 or later
vCloud Director administrator account credentials of the System organization
vCloud Adapter – Download the adapter installation TGZ file anonymously from ftp://ftp.integrien.com/

Installing the adapter

Go to the vCOps admin page: http://vcopsip/admin and go to the update tab

Click the browse button and navigate to the folder where you have extracted the adapter files from the original TGZ, select the .pak file.

Click the Update button and click OK to confirm the update

The adapter file will be uploaded to your vCOps setup.

Read (yeah ok then) and accept the EULA and click OK.

Confirm the update by clicking OK.

The installation will begin…

Once completed you will see the update status on the screen.

Now go to the custom web page: https://vcopsip/vcops-custom/

Once logged in click the Admin menu and then support

You will be presented with the Support page

Click the Info tab and press the smallest button in the world, I missed this button so many times !

Click yes to start the describe process.

A confirmation box will appear.

After a couple of seconds you should see our adapter in the list of adapters available.

Configuring the adapter

You should now be able to follow along with the vCOps adapter PDF which was part of the TGZ file from page 17, setting up the adapter is fairly straight forward.

Creating a custom Dashboard

As the installation doesn’t create any dashboards for you I highly recommend visiting Clint’s site and reading his great post which shows how to setup a custom Dashboard here: http://velemental.com/2012/04/12/tutorial-building-custom-dashboards-in-vcops/

PowerShell at VMworld 2012 San Francisco

2 Replies

Its that time again! – VMworld, and let me tell you, this year its going to be epic!

I wanted to give you a list of all the PowerShell and PowerCLI sessions listed in this years Session Catalogue for San Francisco, if you don’t have these booked make sure you add them straight away as room is running out fast !

I am personally looking forward to presenting with some superstars this year such as:

Luc “The Master” Dekens
Jake “Head in the Clouds” Robinson
William “API Guru” Lam
Eric “PowerTool” Williams
Aidan “I am the center of excellence” Dalgliesh

We have some great decks and some awesome demos planned, don’t miss them. And if you see me come say hi and tell me how you use PowerCLI, you never know I may have a spare sticker, poster and badge to get rid of.

Sessions

INF-VSP1252 – What’s New with vSphere Automation

In this session Technical Marketing automation experts William Lam and Alan Renouf will take you through VMware Automation.You will learn which products are available, which products to use and how Automation fits into the VMware Suite of products. In this session Alan and William will take you through the exciting features available to use when automating VMware products, both beginners and experts will learn how to use new features to make your life easier and more productive.

Monday, Aug 27, 2:30 PM – 3:30 PM

Wednesday, Aug 29, 9:30 AM – 10:30 AM

William Lam – Sr. Technical Marketing Engineer, VMware, Inc.

Alan Renouf – Sr. Technical Marketing Architect, VMware, Inc.

INF-BCO2155 – vCloud DR for Oxford University Computing Services – Real World Example

Resiliency is a key aspect of any infrastructure—it is even more important in infrastructure-as-a-service solutions. This session will include a tour of a real world vCloud DR solution deployed at Oxford University Computing Services (OUCS). Throughout the session there will be detailed guidance on how both the management and resource clusters were designed, deployed and automated. Furthermore the details of how SRM in conjunction with VMware vSphereTM PowerCLI (PowerCLI) was used to automate the end-to-end recovery of a vCloud Director–based infrastructure. This session will offer a perfect complimentary follow on from the whitepaper regarding the high-level process produced by Duncan Epping and Chris Colotti and the Automation session by Alan Renouf and Aidan Dalgleish. The paper combined with the Automation session will describe the process and the automation principles whereas this session will describe a complete real world implementation.

Monday, Aug 27, 3:30 PM – 4:30 PM

Aidan Dalgleish – Consulting Architect, VMware, Inc.

Adrian Parks – Senior Systems Administrator, Oxford University Computing Services

Gary Blake – Senior Consultant, VMware, Inc.

INF-VSP1329 – PowerCLI Best Practices: The Return!

Building on the success of our PowerCLI Best Practices sessions from VMworld 2011, we want to show you our next collection of PowerCLI best practices. This session will show and demonstrate PowerCLI in all its aspects managing and automating not just VMware vSphere® but also VMware vCloud Director®, VMware® View™, VMware vShield™ and more

Tuesday, Aug 28, 3:00 PM – 4:00 PM

Wednesday, Aug 29, 8:00 AM – 9:00 AM

Alan Renouf – Sr. Technical Marketing Architect, VMware, Inc.

Luc Dekens – Systems Engineer, Eurocontrol Maastricht.

INF-VSP2448 – Automating Bare Metal to the Cloud and Beyond

When working in the cloud automation is key, working at the scale of the cloud VMware customers need an easy and reliable method of deployment which gives guaranteed results 100% of the time. Cisco, VMware and Bluelock will show you how to automate the build of your complete vCloud Director Infrastructure from the bare metal up to the cloud and beyond. Learn how PowerShell can be used to create a single easily readable and adaptable script to ensure your system is built quickly and efficiently, watch as a system is built before your very eyes with no magic tricks or rabbits in sight.

Tuesday, Aug 28, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM

Eric Williams – Technical Marketing Engineer, Cisco Systems Inc.

Alan Renouf – Sr. Technical Marketing Architect, VMware, Inc.

Jake Robinson – Solutions Architect, BlueLock

INF-VSP1856 – Become a Rock Star with PowerCLI and vCenter Orchestrator

Automation is the future of cloud, and in this session attendees will learn how to identify areas in their environment that are primed for less administrator interaction. The combination of PowerCLI and VMware® vCenter™ Orchestrator puts considerable power in even the greenest users. Attendees will learn how to identify areas for automation and start learning to discern which tool is best suited for the job and when to use them together.

Monday, Aug 27, 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM

Josh Atwell – Systems Administrator, Cisco Systems Inc.

INF-VSP2164 – Automation of vCloud Director Disaster Recovery

Resiliency is a key aspect of any infrastructure—it is even more important in infrastructure-as-a-service solutions. This session will include guidance, examples and demonstrations of the use of VMware vSphereTM PowerCLI (PowerCLI) to automate the recovery of a vCloud Director–based infrastructure. In particular the session will focus on the automation of the recovery steps for vCloud Director managed vApp workloads, that cannot be recovered with vSphere Site Recovery Manager (SRM). This session will offer a perfect complimentary follow on from the whitepaper regarding the high-level process released by Duncan Epping and Chris Colotti. The paper discussed the process and this session will describe the automation

Tuesday, Aug 28, 4:30 PM – 5:30 PM

Alan Renouf – Sr. Technical Marketing Architect, VMware, Inc.

Aidan Dalgleish – Consulting Architect, VMware, Inc.

Group Discussions

GD27 – PowerCLI with Alan Renouf

During this group discussion we will talk about what can be automated, discuss the merits of using PowerShell and PowerCLI, show examples and talk about the best methods of achieving integration. We will also discuss tips and tricks you have learned and the best methods for automating the VMware products. Come prepared with examples and questions and remember this is a Group Discussion!

Monday, Aug 27, 10:30 AM – 11:30 AM

Thursday, Aug 30, 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM

Alan Renouf – Sr. Technical Marketing Architect, VMware, Inc.

Hands on Labs

HOL-INF-10 – Script and Develop Your Cloud Solution with PowerCLI and the vSphere Web Client SDK

This lab is presented as two 30 minute lightning labs to help you extend your VMware solution. The PowerCLI module covers automating vSphere and vCloud Director. Novice users will learn to use the tool and more advanced users will get familiar with the new functionality available in the latest release of the product. You will walk away with a better understanding of PowerCLI and how it can help you in your day-to-day work. The vSphere Web Client SDK module teaches you several techniques for extending the vSphere Web Client. The goal of this module is to demonstrate the close integration that is possible with the vSphere Web Client SDK, and the ease with which you can integrate your own solutions into the vSphere Web Client.

HOL

Attend the self paced Hands on Lab.

Videos

Still cant decide ? Take a look at some of the session videos where the presenters explain more information…..

Indianapolis VMUG User Conference – 26th July 2012

VMware PowerCLI

This will take place in the Sagamore 5-7 room and will be at 11:00 – 11:45

Tired of clicking the Next, Next, Next, button for those simple jobs ?

Do you have a vSphere or vCD task you repeat every month, week, day or even hour ?

Join me in this PowerCLI session as I take you from beginner to Scripting Ninja. In this session I will show you not only how to use PowerCLI but also how to teach yourself, I will show you the great resources available on the internet and how to take PowerCLI to the next level.

If you do it more than once, come learn how to script it!

Event Details

Thursday, July 26, 2012
8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.

Indiana Convention Center
100 S. Capitol Avenue
Indianapolis, IN 46225

Make sure you register here before attending.

Agenda

A copy of the full agenda and other sessions taking place can be found here: http://www.vmug.com/index.php?mo=cm&op=ld&fid=201

Carolina VMUG–15th May 2012

1 Reply

Next week I will be presenting at the Carolina VMUG, im looking forward to this one as I get the chance to view a part of America I have never visited before and also catch up with some friends and people I have never met face to face.

I will be presenting twice at the VMUG, once on PowerCLI for vCloud Director and another time presenting with Josh Atwell, Josh is a such a great and enthusiastic guy who has some fantastic ideas and the humor to make our session a fun time for all. If you have never visited Josh’s blog I suggest you head over to http://www.vtesseract.com/ – Who knows where he gets some of the images for his posts ?!

I will be presenting the following sessions , if you are at the VMUG make sure you attend or at least come by and say Hi!

PowerCLI 201

Presenting with Josh Atwell we will take you through the basics of PowerCLI and then progress to some more advanced topics showing you how to use Community code and make the most of the wealth that is provided by the PowerShell and PowerCLI Community.

This session is sure to be great fun and will include some tips and tricks which any vSphere admin will not want to miss.

vCloud Director PowerCLI

This session will show you the basics and also some advanced parts of PowerCLI 5.0.1 and specifically how to use these to not only report on your cloud infrastructure but also how to create one from scratch, save time and make your life easier as a cloud admin.

This is the perfect addition to Chris Colotti’s session earlier that day (a must attend).

Event Details

Tuesday, May 15, 2012

8:00 a.m. – 5:00 p.m.

Charlotte Convention Center
501 South College Street
Charlotte, NC 28202
Click here for directions.

Make sure you register here before attending.

Agenda

A copy of the full agenda and other sessions taking place can be found here: http://www.vmug.com/d/do/1280