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About Alan Renouf

Alan Renouf is a Senior Technical Marketing Architect at VMware focused on the automation and integration of VMware products. Alan is a frequent blogger at http://blogs.vmware.com/vipowershell and has a personal blog at http://virtu-al.net. You can follow Alan on twitter as @alanrenouf.

VMware Mobile Knowledge Portal – App update

Posted on April 15, 2013 by Alan Renouf

Version 2.0 of the popular VMware Mobile Knowledge Portal (VMKP) is now live!

The VMKP is a free app which is designed to provide a simple way for VMware customers to view technical collateral around the Datacenter & Cloud Infrastructure and Infrastructure & Operations Management products.

Gain easy access to a variety of media and download your selected items to your device for when you are without access to the internet, the VMKP contains:

Videos
Evaluation Guides
What’s New papers
White Papers
Posters

The app will be updated and new content will be added routinely, so check the VMKP often!

What’s New ?

VMKP 2.0 adds the following enhancements:

Android and iPad support (Previously only iPad support was available)
Ability to rate collateral
Ability to provide feedback to VMware on pieces of collateral
Integration with Facebook and Twitter to let others know what you have been reading on the VMKP
Mechanism to request additional collateral items – let us know what you want to see!

Download it now

The VMware Mobile Knowledge Portal is now available for both IOS iPad and Android devices and can be downloaded below.

Note: There is a planned update for VMKP 2.0 in late April to better support smaller form factor tablets, such as iPad mini and Nexus 7

The Android version of this app can be downloaded from the Google Play or sent to your device by using the below button:

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.vmware.marketing.mobileknowledgeportal

The iPad App can be downloaded from the App Store by using the below button:

https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=566387182&mt=8

Screenshots

Android:

iPad:

New Whitepaper published–vCloud Disaster Infrastructure Resiliency Case Study

Posted on March 28, 2013 by Alan Renouf

A new whitepaper has just been published on the VMware website, this paper was written by Aidan Dalgleish, Consulting Architect who’s personal blog can be viewed here and Alan Renouf, Sr Technical Marketing Architect.

Overview

VMware vCloud Director® enables enterprise organizations to build secure private clouds that dramatically increase datacenter efficiency and business agility. Coupled with VMware vSphere®, vCloud Director delivers cloud computing for existing datacenters by pooling vSphere virtual resources and delivering them to users as catalog-based services. It helps users build agile infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) cloud environments that greatly accelerate the time to market for applications and the responsiveness of IT organizations.

Resiliency is a key aspect of any infrastructure, it is even more important in IaaS solutions. This technical paper was developed to provide additional insight and information regarding the use of VMware vSphere PowerCLI™ to automate the recovery of a vCloud Director–based infrastructure. In particular, it focuses on automation of the recovery steps for vCloud Director 1.5–managed VMware vSphere vApp™ workloads. The recovery of management components can be achieved using VMware® vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager™ and will not be discussed. It is already available in the original VMware vCloud Director Infrastructure Resiliency Case Study.

vSphere PowerCLI is a powerful command-line tool that enables users to automate all aspects of vSphere management, including network, storage, virtual machine, guest operating system (OS) and more. Included since the release of version 5.0.1, vSphere PowerCLI introduced support for vCloud Director. vSphere PowerCLI is distributed as a Microsoft Windows PowerShell snap-in and includes more than 300 PowerShell cmdlets, along with documentation and examples.

This technical paper discusses the use of PowerShell and PowerCLI to automate the recovery of vCloud Director resource clusters.

Download

Read more and download the whitepaper as a PDF from the VMware website here: http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/10355

New Fling: vCenter 5.1 Pre-Install Check Script

Posted on March 14, 2013 by Alan Renouf

What is a fling?

For those of you who are new to VMware flings, a VMware fling is meant to be an application or a feature which was produced internally and could be useful to customers, not a fully baked production ready solution but a tool to help customers make their lives a little easier.

Or according to the fling site: A fling is a short-term thing, not a serious relationship but a fun one. Likewise, the tools that are offered here are intended to be played with and explored.

What is vCenter 5.1 Pre-Install Check Script?

vCenter 5.1 Pre-Install Check Script is a PowerShell script written to help VMware admins validate their environment and assess if it is ready for a 5.1.x upgrade or install, the script checks for common issues when updating or installing vSphere 5.1 and associated SSO services.

The script checks the Windows Server and Active Directory configuration and provides an on screen report of known issues or configuration issues, the script also provides a text report which can help with further trouble shooting.

All checks are read-only and no changes are made to the system.

Visit the fling site here to find out more information and download the script here: http://labs.vmware.com/flings/vcenter-5-1-pre-install-check-script

Features

The following areas are checked as read-only checks:

Operating System Checks
Active Directory Domain Checks
Active Directory Forest Checks
Time Synchronization Checks
Domain Name System (DNS) Resolution Checks
Port Checks
Domain Controller Checks
vCenter Server Authentication Checks

System Requirements

The following system requirements will need to be met for this script to run correctly:

Windows 2003/ Windows 2008/2008 R2 on 64bit in a domain environment.
.Net Framework 3.5.0 or above
PowerShell 2.0 or above
PowerShell must be able to run scripts (Execution Policy must be assigned correctly)
PowerCLI 5.1 is required for an upgrade scenario.
PowerShell must be launched as Administrator
Run in 64 Bit PowerShell (Do not run in PowerShell (x86))

Running the script

1. Download the fling zip file and unzip into a folder on the local drive.

2. Launch PowerShell from the start menu

3. CD to the location of the downloaded script file and launch the script, for example:

PS C:\>cd Scripts

PS C:\Scripts>.\PreCheckv2.ps1

4. The script will run and a graphical application will be launched

5. If this script is being used to check an upgrade of vCenter from a previous version please enter the hostname of the vCenter server in the text box provided, if this is not the case then do not change this box.

6. Click “Run Checks”

7. Once completed it is suggested you check each result box to find the result information and click the “More Information” link to read more information about this potential issue.

Note: Results may vary and some checks may not work on systems configured with IPv6

Example Video

An example of this script running and more information can be found below.

vCloud Suite Poster

Posted on January 28, 2013 by Alan Renouf

Are you still confused by the vCloud Suite? Are you unaware of the products and great features you could have access to right now?

This poster was designed to help you, the vSphere administrators, understand which products are part of the vCloud Suite, this poster will show you what is available as part of the vCloud Suite but also what the vCloud Suite products can be used for.

The vCloud Suite Poster (shown below) can be downloaded as a PDF file from here and printed to hang on your wall, it shows both the cloud management and cloud infrastructure products and how these can be used within the vCloud Suite to turn your IT Infrastructure into a Software-Defined Data Center.

If you are at Partner Exchange 2013 (PEX) make sure you pick up a poster to take back to your office, if you are not at PEX then please click here or the below poster to get the PDF version.

Also, don’t forget to visit http://vmware.com/go/Posters for more fantastic VMware posters available to download.

VMware Posters

Posted on September 11, 2012 by Alan Renouf

This page is dedicated to the VMware posters which were created by Technical Marketing and have been released at VMworld and VMUGs around the world, this is a central place to find the latest versions of the PDF versions which can be used for reference or printed off as needed.

If you didn’t enter this post with the short URL then remember, to get here just use: http://vmware.com/go/posters/

Use the following links to jump straight to the correct area of this page:

VMware vCloud Suite Poster
VMware ESXi 5.1 Reference Poster
VMware Management with PowerCLI 5.1 Poster
VMware vCloud Networking Poster
VMware Hands-On Labs 2012 Poster
VMware vCloud SDKs Poster
Poster printing details
Poster Issues and Corrections

VMware vCloud Suite

Click here to download the PDF.

VMware ESXi 5.1 Reference Poster

Click here to download the PDF. (Please see the bottom of this page for important information)

Poster Printing Details

The following sizes (inches) are normally used when sending these PDF files to be professionally printed, the posters should also be produced as a vector and are therefore scalable to multiples of the sizes listed below, if you are looking to print in high resolution, you should print in no lower than 300 dpi:

vCloud Suite poster – 34 x 22
PowerCLI 5.1 poster – 42 x 22
Hands On Lab Reference – 33 x 17
vCloud Networking – 44 x 30.5
ESXi 5.1 Reference – 34 x 22

Poster Issues and Corrections:

The following issues and corrections are part of the distributed hard copy posters and PDF files received before October 13th 2012, the current uploaded PDF in this post has these corrections included.

ESXi 5.1 Reference Poster

Use the following correct code instead of the code available on the poster, the poster code will cause an error.

List Registered VMs (vCLI only)

# vmware-cmd -l

# vmware-cmd -s register /vmfs/volumes/<volume name>/<vm>/<vm>.vmx <datacenter> <resource pool>

Unregister a VM (vCLI only)

# vmware-cmd -s unregister /vmfs/volumes/<volume name>/<vm>/<vm>.vmx

Get VM power state (vCLI only)

# vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/<volume name>/<vm>/<vm>.vmx getstate

Power on a VM (vCLI only)

# vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/<volume name>/<vm>/<vm>.vmx start

Shutdown a VM (vCLI only)

# vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/<volume name>/<vm>/<vm>.vmx stop [ soft | hard ]

Power off a VM (vCLI only)

# vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/<volume name>/<vm>/<vm>.vmx stop [ soft | hard ]

Reset a VM (vCLI only)

# vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/<volume name>/<vm>/<vm>.vmx reset [soft | hard ]

Suspend a VM (vCLI only)

# vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/<volume name>/<vm>/<vm>.vmx suspend [soft | hard ]

Resume a VM (vCLI only)

# vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/<volume name>/<vm>/<vm>.vmx resume [soft | hard ]

Get ESXi Host Platform Information (vCLI only)

# vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/<volume name>/<vm>/<vm>.vmx getproductinfo [ product | platform | build | majorversion| minorversion ]

Get VM Uptime (vCLI only)

# vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/<volume name>/<vm>/<vm>.vmx getuptime

Get VMware Tools Status (vCLI only)

# vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/<volume name>/<vm>/<vm>.vmx gettoolslastactive

0 = Not installed/Not running

1 = Normal

5 = Intermittent Heartbeat

100 = No heartbeat. Guest operating system might have stopped responding

Create VM Snapshot (vCLI only)

# vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/<volume name>/<vm>/<vm>.vmx createsnapshot <name> <desc> <quiesce> <memory>

quiesce = Quiesce filesystem w/VMware Tools [ 0 | 1 ]

memory = Include memory state in snapshot [ 0 | 1 ]

Check if VM has a Snapshot (vCLI only)

# vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/<volume name>/<vm>/<vm>.vmx hassnapshot

Revert to VM Snapshot (vCLI only)

# vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/<volume name>/<vm>/<vm>.vmx revertsnapshot

Commit VM Snapshot (vCLI)

# vmware-cmd /vmfs/volumes/<volume name>/<vm>/<vm>.vmx removesnapshot

Forcibly Stop a VM with ESXCLI

# esxcli vm process list

# esxcli vm process kill –type [ soft | hard | force ] -w <worldId>

soft = similiar to kill or kill -SIGTERM

hard = similiar to kill -9 or kill -SIGKILL

force = use as a last resort

Under the “Virtual Machine Capabilities”. The max VM video memory for all versions is listed in KB instead of MB.

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