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Did you know vCenter Server can manage multiple hypervisors?

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VMware vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager is a component that enables support for heterogeneous hypervisors in a VMware vCenter Server environment. It provides the following benefits to your virtual environment:

 
  • An integrated platform for managing VMware and third-party hypervisors from a single interface.
  • A hypervisor choice for the different business units in your organization to accommodate their specific needs.
  • No single hypervisor vendor lock-in.

When you add a third-party host to vCenter Server, all virtual machines that exist on the host are discovered automatically, and are added to the third-party hosts inventory.

The ability of vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager to migrate virtual machines from third-party hosts to ESX or ESXi hosts is implemented by exposing the capabilities of vCenter Converter Standalone in the vSphere Client. See VMware KB article 2048927 for information about dependency between vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager and vCenter Converter Standalone.

Key Capabilities

vCenter Multi-Hypervisor Manager 1.1 introduces the following set of basic management capabilities over third-party hosts:

  • Third-party host management including add, remove, connect, disconnect, and view the host configuration.
  • Ability to migrate virtual machines from third-party hosts to ESX or ESXi hosts.
  • Ability to provision virtual machines on third-party hosts.
  • Ability to edit virtual machine settings.
  • Integrated vCenter Server authorization mechanism across ESX/ESXi and third-party hosts inventories for privileges, roles, and users.
  • Automatic discovery of pre-existing third-party virtual machines
  • Ability to perform power operations with hosts and virtual machines.
  • Ability to connect and disconnect DVD, CD-ROM, and floppy drives and images to install operating systems.

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VMware vCenter Server 5.1 Update 1 Released

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There have been some rumors but I can now officially share the update release 1 for vSphere vCenter Server 5.1.

vCenter Server 5.1 Update 1 | Build 1064983
vCenter Server Appliance 5.1 Update 1 | Build 1065184

Download from VMware.com

What’s New

This release of VMware vCenter Server 5.1 Update 1 offers the following improvements:

  • vCenter Server is now supported on Windows Server 2012
  • Additional vCenter Server Database Support: vCenter Server now supports the following databases.
    • Microsoft SQL Server 2012
    • Microsoft SQL Server 2008 R2 SP2
  • Additional Guest Operating System Customization Support -vCenter Server now supports customization of the following guest operating systems:
    • Windows 8
    • Windows Server 2012
    • Ubuntu12.04
    • RHEL 5.9
  • vCenter Essentials no longer enforces vRAM usage limit of 192 GB
    With vSphere 5.1 Update 1, the Essentials and Essentials Plus licenses no longer restrict virtual machine power-on operations when the vRAM usage limit of 192 GB is met.
  • Resolved Issues – This release delivers a number of bug fixes that have been documented in the Resolved Issues section.

Click to review the complete VMware vSphere 5.1 Update 1 release notes

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VMware Mobile Knowledge Portal – App update

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Android app on Google Play VMware Mobile Knowledge Portal - Regalix, Inc

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:

Android app on Google Play

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:

VMware Mobile Knowledge Portal - Regalix, Inc

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

Screenshots

Android:

2013-04-12 16.36.182013-04-12 16.34.54

iPad:

Photo 12-04-2013 16 58 55

Photo 12-04-2013 16 59 22

vCenter Certificate Automation Tool – Now Available

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With the release of vCenter 5.1 adding additional certificates into the environment to make communication between components more secure, the process of updating these certificates with customers’ own signed certificates has been a challenge.

We are pleased to announce the general availability of vCenter Certificate Automation Tool 1.0. This tool provides an automated mechanism to replace certificates in the following components of the vCenter Server 5.1 management platform:

 

The tool is available now and can be downloaded for free from the VMware download website

For more information on how to install, and use the tool, refer to KB article: Deploying and Using the SSL Certificate Automation Tool (2041600).

This tool is fully supported by VMware.

 

Note: The new certificate tool does NOT handle replacement of certificates in ESXi hosts.

New Whitepaper published–vCloud Disaster Infrastructure Resiliency Case Study

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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

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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.

Heading to the VMware Partner Exchange this year?

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If your going to be in Las Vegas for the annual 2013 VMware Partner Exchange, why don’t you come and check out my sessions on vSphere 5.1 covering the vSphere web client and vCenter components like Single Sign-On

Thursday, Feb 28, 9:00 AM – 10:00 AM
CI1544 - vSphere Web Client - Technical Walkthrough
With the release of vSphere 5.1 was a new primary client for the management of vSphere Solutions. With this session we will build competency in the adoption of the vSphere Web Client by highlighting the differences, easing the initial reaction to a Web Client and show you how to wow your customers with real world use cases

Thursday, Feb 28, 10:15 AM – 12:15 PM
CI1545 - vSphere – Deployment Best Practices
With the new technologies introduced with vSphere 5.1 many unanswered questions exist with designing and deploying the vSphere 5.1 environment. This session will share best practices learned from the field and provide common scenarios with recommended configurations of vCenter, Single Sign-On, Inventory Service and the web client that will future proof your customers environment. This session has now been extended to include Kyle Gleed (@VMwareESXi) discussing best practices on deploying and working with vSphere hosts (ESXi)

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vCenter Single Sign-On – Part 2: Deployment Options

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Now you understand what vCenter Single Sign-On (SSO) provides, as you start to design or upgrade to your vSphere 5.1 environment, particular attention needs to be given in the planning stages around the placement and configuration of the SSO server. This will always be the first component to be installed; regardless of fresh install or upgrading from a previous version. The SSO server can be deployed in a number of configurations and I will explain these options and too why you may use each option.

During the installation process you will be presented with the below screen which is a key decision on which deployment method of SSO you would like to deploy. It is very important that you have planned your SSO deployment as changing this configuration later is possible but not an easy achievement. Continue reading →

An update to vCenter Server 5.1 released, version 5.1.0B available now

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An update for the vSphere vCenter Server 5.1 has been released to address a couple of issues that didn’t make it into the GA version. If you have experienced issues with timeout errors occurring when logging in to the vSphere Client or logging in to a vSphere Web Client as a user of an Active Directory domain that has a non-standard UPN or have changed the Single Sign-On master password you probably should look at updating to the new release.

You can get the updated files from vmware.com and I would highly recommend reading the release notes for a full list of known issues that have been resolved in this release as well as a readme that has been included to add additional assisting information.

If you haven’t been sold on the vCenter Appliance yet you should checkout the update process when using the vCenter Appliance; just navigate to the upgrade tab and apply the update from there (internet or cdrom), the process for updating the vCenter appliance is very slick and another reason why you should be looking into it. For those using the installable version of vCenter Server (Windows) we provide an ISO image.

Setting up vCloud Networking and Security 5.1 Edge DHCP service

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VMware vCloud Networking and Security Edge is part of the vCloud Networking and Security solution and provides network edge security and gateway services such as DHCP, VPN, NAT, Firewall and Load Balancing. Edge supports DHCP IP address pooling and one-to-one static IP address allocation. In this blog, I am going to show step-by-step configuration of Edge DHCP capabilities.

Each Edge virtual appliance can have a total of ten uplink and internal network interfaces. In the deployment below, we have two internal networks on the Edge used for SJDC-VDI-Sales and SJDC-VDI-Guests virtual machines. Uplink interface is connected to 10.20.182.0/24 network with access to corporate network. In this example, we are going to use Edge DHCP service to assign IP addresses to SJDC-VDI-Sales and SJDC-VDI-Guests VMs. One of the VM on SJDC-VDI-Sales is hosting sales web portal and we are going to define a DHCP static IP binding (192.168.200.100) for that VM.

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