Week 4 already. Just one week before VMware Partner Exchange kicks off in Las Vegas. I'll be around, but not for PEX we're doing VCDX panels. I guess this week was all about the NetApp/Cisco/VMware announcement. And for those who missed, be sure to read this article by Vaughn as it captures the essence of the announcement. Now without further ado; here's the top 5:
- Luc Dekens – dvSwitch scripting – Part 6 – Private VLAN
Another post in the dvSwitch series. This time I’ll tackle the creation and use of a private VLANs (PVLAN) on a dvSwitch.
For those that are not that familiar with PVLANs have a look at KB1010691, that article gives a good overview of the PVLAN concept. And there were several sessions during the last VMworld that talked about PVLANs. The most noteworthy being TA2525 VMware vSphere 4 Networking Deep Dive.
In short, PVLANs allows isolation for guests on a shared IP subnet. - Steve Chambers – Cisco UCS: different workload, different configuration, same blade. Simple.
With Unified Fabric you have a drastically reduced amount of physical connections: instead, you run multiple workloads over the same bit of string and separate them using network and storage virtualization. On one 10GbE pipe you can run IP, NFS, iSCSI, FC. Remember those “which protocol is best?” arguments: consign them to the bin, you can now run whatever you want over Ethernet. Just tell a Service Profile what VLAN or VSAN to present to an OS, with a click of the mouse, and you’re done. No cabling or network card work required. Different workload, different network connections, same blade. Simple. - Eric Siebert – Lessons learned in a power outage
Know your ESX command line, if your vCenter Server and other
workstations are not available you’ll need to start VM’s using the
command line. Even if your DNS server is on a local VM you won’t be
able to start it without the vSphere Client. Therefore you’ll have to
log into the ESX console and manually start it, if you don’t know the
command to do this that could be a problem. Keep a cheat sheet by your
hosts with the basic commands that you’ll need like vmware-cmd to get
things up and running using the console. - Rodney Haywood – Viewing the vCloud future
In 2008 VMware were talking about "application workloads" and "vApps" which were essentially just containers for servers. The fear was the requirement to rewrite applications to be usable on the Cloud. I think many in the Infrastructure space (VMware's existing customer base) focused on this server focus. Yet there was the key phrase in the speech, the workloads of today and tomorrow. "How do I take my collection of infrastructure resources and increasingly see them as a single giant computer on which I can flexibly run both todays application workloads and tomorrows application loads." How could we forget Maritzs love for Ruby.
- Nicholas Weaver – Look I'm A Tool! : vSphere Session Monitor 1.0
I bet at this point you are thinking: “Well Nick, that is cool and dandy but I can get that info from my vSphere client! Way to reinvent the wheel…”
Well… now for the best part. This is the real reason I wrote this little app. It all started with my senior engineer, Justin. He had a nasty habit of yelling out “What are you doing?” every time someone did something on a vCenter server. That got me thinking; “It would be cool if something popped up telling Justin someone logged in. And it would be even cooler if you didn’t have to have the vSphere Client running to do it.”
