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Category Archives: Uncategorized

vSphere 5.1 Hardening Guide Release Candidate now available

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I have posted the following in the vSphere Security blog. It is being cross-posted here to get maximum visibility and as an FYI

vSphere 5.1 Hardening Guide Release Candidate now available

I would like to announce the release of the Rev B/Release Candidate for the vSphere 5.1 Security Hardening Guide.  This guide should be functionally complete and has been posted for your review and your feedback.

We’d love to hear your feedback, good and bad, on the contents of the guide. I would encourage you to post your reply in the Security and Compliance Communities forum but if you have more sensitive concerns, send it to me at mfoley@vmware.com. The intent is to publish the final GA copy in two weeks with any changes/updates incorporated so get your inputs in as soon as possible!

The vSphere 5.1 Security Hardening Guide has been posted to the VMware Communities in the “Security and Compliance” area, in the Documents tab. A separate Change Log document has also been published with the RC Guide.

Thanks to everyone who provided feedback on the Rev A Draft, and also to the team at VMware who contributed to this guide in many significant ways.

Thanks,
mike foley

New Beta Program offering: VMware Hosted Beta

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Many of you probably have participated in one of the many beta programs VMware has offered in the last couple of years. I personally have participated in various beta programs when I was a customer / partner and I always loved going through the various exercises. The challenging part for me always was finding the time to setup the environment.

Recently VMware started offering a new way to participate in the evaluation and feedback of VMware’s developing products. The VMware Beta Program is now offering a Hosted Beta; providing registered users access to pre-build online Lab environments with guided workflows to get a closer look at the latest and greatest VMware technologies without the need to build-out infrastructure onsite.

This hosted technology is based on the same technologies used for the Hands-On Labs (HOL) at VMworld, providing a fully built environment to explore intricate product features while requiring nothing more than an HTML5 compliant browser and the latest View Client.

In my opinion this is a great opportunity to test-drive products and provide VMware with your feedback on the features still under development. On top of that this will allow you to spend 1-2 hour blocks to get acquainted with new technology, without the need to be on-site. You can do this at the office, or at home with just a connection to the internet.

If you are interested and want to learn more about the VMware Beta Program you can go here: http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/beta

If you are interested in joining the VMware Beta Program you can either work with your VMware account team or submit a participation request form found here: http://communities.vmware.com/community/beta/betainterest

Managing Virtual Hardware Versions During a vSphere Upgrade

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In my last blog I talked about how the extended VMware Tools support provided by VMware helps facilitate vSphere upgrades.  In this blog I want to discuss how the extended virtual hardware support also helps with upgrades and call your attention to an important distinction between the two.

Like with VMware Tools, VMware provides extended support for older virtual hardware versions.  That is to say that newer ESXi hosts can run virtual machines with an older virtual hardware version.   For example, vSphere 5.1 supports VMs running virtual hardware versions, 4, 7, 8 and 9.  However, it is important to note that virtual machines running newer virtual hardware versions cannot run on older versions of ESXi.  For example, a virtual machine running virtual hardware 9 cannot run on an ESXi 5.0 host.  The following table highlights the virtual hardware version support for vSphere 4.0 and above.

Continue reading →

Storage DRS survey

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If you have a few spare minutes, please fill out the survey about Storage DRS usage. We are very interested in your Storage DRS architecture and which options you use. But we are also seeking to identify adoption blockers preventing you to use Storage DRS. It takes about 5 minutes to get through.

Storage DRS survey

Technical Marketing Update 2012 – Week 47 – #tmupdate

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#TMUPDATE

This week marks some milestones.  For me personally, this week I started my 7th year here at VMware, and I’m personally excited that we still have cool stuff and I’m still thrilled to be working on it and writing about it.  Duncan, who’s been posting the updates, is moving over to a new role at VMware, and I’ll be taking over the weekly updates on material that Tech Marketing has been producing.  Here’s what the Cloud Infrastructure Tech Marketing group turned out for this week:

BLOGS

vSphere Blog:

  •  VMware vSphere Data Protection (VDP) Error and Time Synchronization – Jeff Hunter - http://bit.ly/TwHYjF
  •  Updated VMFS Whitepaper now available – Cormac Hogan - http://bit.ly/Tre14w
  •  Is vSphere Replication storage agnostic even when using SRM? – Ken Werneburg - http://bit.ly/WXQU7b
  •  Configuring SNMP v1/v2c/v3 Using ESXCLI 5.1 – William Lam - http://bit.ly/WXAfAO
  •  Load Balancing using vCloud Networking and Security 5.1 Edge – Ranga Maddipudi - http://bit.ly/WWiuBV
  •  Automating CA Self-Signed Certificates for ESXi 5.1 for use with resxtop – William Lam - http://bit.ly/TmHA7n
  •  Manage the vCloud Suite vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) 5.1 from the vSphere Web Client – Rawlinson Rivera - http://bit.ly/WS8oBW

Cormachogan.com:

Frankdenneman.nl:

Virtu-Al.net:

virtuallyGhetto:

Yellow-bricks.com:

WHITEPAPERS

  •  VMware Virtual Machine File System: Technical Overview and Best Practices – Cormac Hogan - http://bit.ly/11hZT2y
  •  VMware vSphere Storage APIs – Array Integration (VAAI) – Cormac Hogan - http://bit.ly/Qw80WY

 

Technical Marketing Speaking Engagements – November 2012 – #tmupdate

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After I saw Cormac posting his speaking engagements I figured why not do this for the whole team. I made a list for November, if you are in the area make sure to stop by and attend!

Cormac Hogan:

Duncan Epping:

Frank Denneman:

Alan Renouf:

William Lam:

Justin King:

Jeff Hunter:

Mark Achtemichuk:

Jim Senicka:

Autoscaling in vSphere survey!

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As the infrastructure layer matures, the IT problems and bottlenecks are moving closer to the application layer. Autoscaling of application workloads is a feature that is important to customers building private clouds. VMware is uniquely positioned to be able to deliver autoscaling of infrastructure layer using insights from how application are performing. With technologies like Hyperic APM, Orchestration technologies like vCO and DynamicOps VMware already owns key pieces of the puzzle to providing a powerful autoscaling solution. We are looking for feedback on what you feel is important for your applications.
We have created this survey and would very much appreciate your feedback. It doesn’t take longer than 10 minutes to fill out, so please take the time.

 

@DuncanYB at VMworld 2012 Barcelona

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I figured I would follow the infamous Cormac Hogan with a post around my VMworld activities. This is what my schedule looks like currently. If you want to meet me, have a discussion around anything VMware related I highly recommend the Expert 1:1 or Group Discussions! Note that you can register for the Group Discussions but you will need to sign up for the 1:1 at the show itself.

VMware vCloud Networking Poster

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During VMworld 2012 (US)  we released a brand new networking poster. This poster is a reference to all things related to vSphere Standard Switch (VSS), vSphere Distributed Switch (VDS), and Virtual Extensible Local Area Network (VXLAN) technology. It provides you information on the different components, terminologies and parameters of VSS, VDS, and VXLAN. It also explains the advanced features of VDS and discusses some best practices. You can download the pdf of this poster here

I hope you like it. As always, I would love to hear your feedback.

vMotion without shared storage requirement, does it have a name?

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With the release of version 5.1, VMware introduced some extra functionality to the vMotion platform. One of these enhancements enables vMotion to run in environments without shared storage.

I heard a lot of names floating around the community, such as X-vMotion, Unified vMotion and enhanced vMotion, but in reality we do not brand this particular enhancement as a separate feature. To give you some background of the previous mentioned terms: X-vMotion was the internal code name for this feature, this name is still visible in the ESXi Host Advanced Setting with the rest of the internal codenames. Unified vMotion is a reference to the unified architecture which combines vMotion and parts of the Storage vMotion for this process. When a virtual machine needs to be migrated between hosts that do not share storage, vMotion copies the data across the vMotion network using some of the Storage vMotion code. A separate article will appear soon expanding on the technical bits of this process.

A separate product name usually means a separate license and that is the beauty of this enhancement. vMotion without the shared storage requirement is available in all kits and edition that have vMotion included. This means, if you are using vMotion today, the moment you upgrade to vSphere 5.1, you can migrate virtual machines between hosts without the need of shared storage and without any downtime.