If you haven’t noticed I’ve been lacking in the content department for VMwareTips.com and for that, I apologize. Most of my readers and friends in the industry know that when I joined EMC I’ve had some fundamental issues with content due to my new job. Frankly it was way easier to talk as a customer and end-user with tips, tricks and issues that I found when using the products on a daily basis. As an employee I’m doing a lot more evangelizing than hands-on, and the time I do spend in the lab is doing very specific projects with lab equipment..which means I either cannot discuss what’s happening or there just isn’t enough data to talk about. I did find a little niche where I was creating instructional videos on specific topics, my readers seem to like this and I really enjoy putting them together.

So why haven’t I put something together in the past couple months?  Well, some of you may know this but to the others that do not, I’ll be getting married on May 19th! This has been in the works for quite some time now, but for those of you that are married you know the last months/weeks are when the bride and groom are running around with their heads cut off doing those last minute things.

With that I thank you all for continuing to be avid readers, followers and more importantly friends in the industry. As soon as the wedding fiasco is over and we return from our tropical honeymoon I’ll be right back in the office thinking of content for the blog and awesome new things to talk about. There are some amazing new things with VMware View and vFabric that I’d love to write posts about!

On another note, we have some big events coming up including EMC World and VMworld. I unfortunately will not be at EMC World but I highly recommend you attend, we’ll be showing off some mind blowing technologies (like some of the stuff Chad showed on the latest Chad’s World episode).  For VMworld I’ll be submitting four (4) different sessions, including the always popular Ask the Expert vBloggers, hopefully it will be picked up for US as well as EMEA (first time submitting for Europe!).  The Ask the Experts session is by far one of the most popular sessions at VMworld, you’ll be able to ask your questions to four of the top virtualization experts, Duncan Epping, Frank Denneman, Scott Lowe and Chad Sakac, with me moderating the madness! That’s right, four VCDXs on a single stage..it’s a great time!

That’s about it for me, I’ll most likely be off the radar until my return the week of June 11th, which actually is the week of Cisco Live 2012 in San Diego,  I’ll be speaking at a couple sessions there and if you’re planning on attending I’d love to meet at the EMC booth to chat about what you’re doing with VMware, Cisco and EMC technologies.

Look for some random tweets, perhaps some wedding photos and random chat via my Twitter page. Cheers!

Created on May 8, 2012 by Rick Scherer

Posted under Conferences, EMC, Good Reading, VMworld.

This blog has 0 views and no responses.

Tags: EMC, emc world, marriage, VMworld

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As most of my vFriends would know, I’m a huge fan of blogging and social media in general. I think it’s a great mechanism to reach out to the masses for the means to educate, and to push out messaging in a wide scale. I can honestly say that if it wasn’t for blogging and social media, I probably wouldn’t be where I am today professionally (thanks Chad).

With that said, my good buddy Eric Siebert over at vSphere-land has opened up voting for his top blogs lists called the vLaunchPad, and I’d like to reach out to my readers and frequent visitors to please go out to his site and vote for me along with your other favorite virtualization focused blogs. When you go vote you’ll be asked to choose your top-10 favorite blogs and boy is it going to be difficult to choose, the blogosphere has literally blown up and there are new blogs popping up almost daily so it may take you some time to choose.

Regardless of who you vote for, even if it isn’t me, please be sure to vote… as I can attest, blogging is almost like having another job as it is extremely difficult to find content to write on as well as develop. The people that are behind the great sites you’ll be voting on really put some great effort (typically at the expense of their families) to provide us with great information. Voting closes on 2/7, so please Rock The Vote as soon as possible! :)

Click here to vote!

Created on February 2, 2012 by Rick Scherer

Posted under Good Reading.

This blog has 68 views and no responses.

Tags: blog, bloggers, vlaunchpad, vote, vsphere-land

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Happy Holidays! This video is a continuation of my vSphere 5 Video Series, in this video I cover how to properly leverage VMware vSphere 5.0 Auto Deploy to automatically deploy ESXi hosts in your infrastructure. Auto Deploy is a new feature found in the Enterprise Plus edition of vSphere 5, it allows administrators to deploy stateless images that are deployed via gPXE directly to the RAM of the host. That’s right, ESXi hosts do not require a local HDD/USB/SDCARD to operate as they can simply download their image and configuration (via Host Profile) into RAM and automatically be placed in their correct vCenter Server datacenter/cluster or folder.

As shown above, PowerCLI is used to create an ESXi Image Profile, this image includes the base ESXi installation as well as any additional drivers, third-party integration or plug-in that you would like to include. That Image Profile is then attached to a Deployment Rule that is also created within PowerCLI. The deployment rule dictates what Image Profile is to be used, what host(s) are tied to the deployment rule and some other configuration specifics such as, which Host Profile to attach after the host has been added to vCenter as well as which vCenter DC/Cluster/Folder to add the host to. For example, you can leverage the same Image Profile but have different Deployment Rules based on DRS Cluster.

For those of you that would like to know a little more about how Auto Deploy functions under the covers, there are basically five core components when it comes to Auto Deploy. There is the actual Auto Deploy server (1) which is essentially a web server that pushes an ESXi Image Profile to the server, this is driven by the Rules Engine (2) which is accessed/configured via PowerCLI along with the Image Builder. There is a requirement for a TFTP Server (3) which will store the gPXE bootloader (4) and push it to potential ESXi hosts that are led to it by a DHCP Server (5). Once gPXE is booted it is notified to grab the ESXi Image and Configuration from the Auto Deploy server.

In the video I cover everything that is needed for Auto Deploy to work, including to installation of vCenter Server and the associated Auto Deploy service as well as PowerCLI and creation of the Image Profile and Deployment Rule. By the end of the video you should have a firm understanding of how to leverage Auto Deploy in your environment to its full potential. I even include steps on how to slipstream third party vendor packages into your ESXi Image Profile, including; EMC PowerPath/VE, the VMware vCloud Director agent and the VMware Fault Domain Manager agent (vmware-fdm) which is required for VMware HA to properly function.

For reference, the EMC PowerPath/VE 5.7 vibs can be downloaded from EMC Powerlink, the VMware vCloud Director agent can be copied from your vCloud Director server from the /opt/vmware/vcloud-director/agent folder and the vmware-fdm agent can be grabbed directly from the vCenter Server by adding http://<vcenter-server>/vSphere-HA-depot as an esxsoftwaredepot in PowerCLI.

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Created on December 27, 2011 by Rick Scherer

Posted under vCenter, vSphere.

This blog has 957 views and 4 responses.

Tags: auto deploy, dhcp, EMC, fdm, gpxe, ha, powercli, powerpath, tftp, vcenter, vcloud, vCSA, vsphere 5

(6 votes, average: 4.67 out of 5)

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In this video we’re going to cover the installation, configuration and usage of the VMware vCenter 5.0 Server Appliance (vCSA). The vCSA is a brand new production ready Virtual Appliance that allows you to stand up vCenter Server in literally a few minutes. Once you watch the video you’re going to be like, “Hey Rick, that was more than 5 minutes!”.  For that I do apologize, but when you do watch it you will realize we’re doing a lot more than just installing vCenter 5.0.

First a little disclaimer. vCSA is not for everyone, but in my opinion it should definitely be looked at and should be leveraged wherever it can. vCSA is obviously the direction of where the vCenter Server product is going and hopefully relatively soon it should be at par with its Windows based big brother.

So, why isn’t it for everyone?

As of right now it does not have support for integration with VMware Update Manager (VUM), VMware vCenter Linked-Mode, VMware vSphere Storage Appliance (vSA), VMware vCenter Heartbeat and VMware View Composer. Another concern you may have is that it’s embedded database option (based on DB2) is limited to 5 Hosts and 50 Virtual Machines. Think of the embedded option to be similar to the SQL Express Option in vCenter Server for Windows, great for POC, Demo, Test and extremely small SMB situations, but not practical for production. The final nail in the coffin might be that it only supports Oracle to offer external DB functionality.

Some of those constraints are not going to be avoidable, for example if you require more than 1,000 hosts or 10,000 powered on virtual machines you’re obviously going to need Linked-Mode and the Windows based vCenter Server. If you’re looking to deploy a VDI solution based on VMware View, you’re going to need the Windows based vCenter Server as well. But, if you’re like the majority of VMware vSphere customers, have less than 1,000 hosts, are confident in VMware DRS and HA to protect your vCSA and are OK with the fact that you need Oracle for the external database (which you can virtualize as well)….the vCSA might be for you!

One last thing I wanted to comment on was VMware Update Manager, in my opinion the lack of VUM support for the vCSA might not be that big of an issue, and here’s why; With the introduction of vSphere 5.0, VMware also introduced a few new features, Auto Deploy and Image Builder. These features tied together with Host Profiles truly enable the concept of stateless ESXi. My thought is, if you need to update your ESXi host, simply update the Auto Deploy rule and reboot the machine. Upon the next boot it will automatically be updated and configured properly.  Obviously VUM does a lot more than just ESXi patching, but again, for the majority of vSphere customers they’d be just fine with Auto Deploy.

So have a view of this video to see just how easy it is. I have sped up some portions of the video, specifically the loading of the vSphere Client as well as the deployment of the vCSA OVF template. Also, I suggest watching the video in full-screen mode by clicking the icon on the bottom right of the video. If for whatever reason the video isn’t displaying, you can also use the following link to view; http://youtu.be/o2f1b1vYSis

Created on October 13, 2011 by Rick Scherer

Posted under vCenter, vSphere.

This blog has 643 views and one response.

Tags: auto deploy, composer, db2, drs, esx, esxi, ha, heartbeat, image builder, installation, linked-mode, oracle, sql, update manager, vcenter, vCSA, vdi, video, view, vsa, vsphere 4, vsphere 5, vsphere storage appliance

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This is going to be the first of many in my vSphere 5 Video Series where I’ll cover the basics to getting vSphere 5.0 installed, configured and operating. In this video see just how easy it is to do a bare-metal installation of ESXi 5.0. Out of all of the install and upgrade options available for vSphere 5.0 this by far is the easiest and cleanest method in my opinion.

Upgrading can be extremely easy as well, by leveraging VMware Update Manager (VUM) it allows existing configurations to be migrated and will even allow you to migrate from ESX to ESXi. One thing to keep in mind when doing a migration with VUM from vSphere 4 to vSphere 5 is that if you are using the ESX edition of vSphere 4 and have custom scripts, agents or modules loaded into ESX those will not be migrated into ESXi 5.0.

Whatever your situation might be, my recommendation has always been to do a fresh installation of ESXi then leverage Host Profiles to push the configuration to the host. Even if you’re not an Enterprise Plus customer you can still get all of the benefits, like Host Profiles, free for 60 days by simply not licensing the product. Remember, you must license before the 60 days are up to avoid any service disruption.

Another great feature of vSphere 5 is Image Builder and Auto Deploy, I’ll cover Auto Deploy into more detail later, but with Image Builder you can build custom ESXi builds that include third party drivers and other custom data. Don’t worry though, you can still do custom installations with kickstart if you’d like, but after you see Auto Deploy you’re not going to want to.

So have a view of this video to see just how easy it is. I have sped up some portions of the video, specifically the blade server booting, the hardware discovery process and actually installation portion. Also, I suggest watching the video in full-screen mode by clicking the icon on the bottom right of the video. If for whatever reason the video isn’t displaying, you can use the following link to view; http://youtu.be/aN9mc9YNiC0

Created on October 10, 2011 by Rick Scherer

Posted under vSphere.

This blog has 621 views and no responses.

Tags: esx, esxi, installation, installing, video, vsphere 4, vsphere 5

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144 Bottles of Water, 48 Cans of Monster Lo-Carb, 50 Bags of Single Serve Chips, 270 Peanut Butter Sandwich Crackers, 144 Bottles of 5-Hour Energy and 300 Oreo Cookies (unfortunately there has been no accurate count of alcoholic beverage)… that is how VMworld started for some of the members of the vSpecialist Organization within EMC on Thursday.

Actually, Über teams within the vSpecialist organization at EMC started months ago with a strategic plan to cause peoples minds to literally explode from all of the awesome-sauce VMware and EMC will jointly deliver the week of VMworld 2011. This includes a huge EMC core booth with 13 VDI enabled workstations showing the latest and great products, there is also a separate EMC vLabs booth that will have 15 workstations that will allow attendees to use and abuse 11 different products within the EMC family. This is all in addition to the EMC focused lab, which is located within the official VMworld Hands on Labs (which by the way are powered by EMC technology) inside the Solutions Exchange.

Needless to say, there have been endless hours already spent by the team (of absolute rockstars) to ensure the best experience possible for the attendees of VMworld 2011. The sessions, labs, solutions exchange, TweetUps, parties and ability to network with your vPeers makes this show undoubtedly the best information technology show of the year.

There are about 20 of us here, from around the global, working diligently on getting everything up and running as well as testing for usability/stress and for an overall great experience. The countdown officially started yesterday afternoon and we have until Sunday afternoon (3 full days) to make sure everything is 100%. So, what about after Sunday? Will we get to just sit by the pool, sipping on some tasty margaritas? Well, I’m hoping to have at least 30 minutes of that sometime this trip, but what about the other 107.5 hours of VMworld?

So here is my schedule, full of great sessions, fun networking opportunities, awesome parties and completely slammed….boy I love VMworld!

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Created on August 26, 2011 by Rick Scherer

Posted under Conferences, VMworld.

This blog has 279 views and one response.

Tags: EMC, party, the killers, v0dgeball, VMware, VMworld, vodgeball, vspecialist, vtweetup

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This year at VMworld I have the extreme honor to be moderating a panel discussion with some fellow bloggers that in my opinion are experts in virtualization, Frank Denneman, Duncan Epping, Scott Lowe and Chad Sakac. For those of you attending VMworld be sure to register for VSP1425 – Ask the Expert vBloggers today!

So now here is your chance to be part of this great session!  Do you have a question that you’d like the experts to answer? Simply fill out the form below and your question will be added to the queue! We’ll be answering some of these web-submitted questions live on stage and will be responding to all questions on the VMwareTips.com blog! So, get your question answered and we hope to see you in Las Vegas!

Questionnaire has been removed. Thank you for your support and we look forward to seeing you at VMworld 2012!

Created on July 27, 2011 by Rick Scherer

Posted under VMworld.

This blog has 174 views and one response.

Tags: ask the experts, blog, bloggers, chad sakac, duncan epping, frank denneman, las vegas, scott lowe, VMworld, vsp1425

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We’re just at a month to go until VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas, NV and the official countdown has started within the vSpecialist compound! Boy do we have a lot of great things that we’re going to show you this year, face-melting awesome-sauce things.

Join Chad Sakac (@sakacc) tomorrow morning (Thursday 7/28 at 8:00am PT) as he gives a sneak peak of the latest technology integrations, essential sessions, hands-on lab experience, product demos, must-have giveaways, and fabulous parties!

Click here to register for this session. Don’t miss out!

Created on July 27, 2011 by Rick Scherer

Posted under VMworld.

This blog has 74 views and no responses.

Tags: EMC, VMworld

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It is 9am Pacific Time on Tuesday, July 12th 2011 and I sure hope you’re tuned into the vmware Mega Launch so greatly titled “Raising the Bar, Part V”. If you’re not watching the live broadcast, stop right here and tune into it by clicking this link, then come back and read this post.

Spoiler alert… reading beyond this point talks about amazing updates and new features from vmware!

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Created on July 12, 2011 by Rick Scherer

Posted under Cloud, Security, SRM, Storage, vCenter, VMware HA, vSphere.

This blog has 761 views and one response.

Tags: sdrs, site recovery manager, srm, storage drs, vaai, vasa, vcd, vcloud director, VMware, vsa, vshield, vsphere, vsphere 5

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Another one of those posts today that most likely will not affect most, however there is a known issue with the vStorage APIs for Array Integration (VAAI) mixed together with EMC VMAX Storage Arrays. My best bud, Chad Sakac, wrote about this last week (over here).

Long story short, if you’re running a VMAX with Enginuity 5875.135.91 or 5875.139.93 along with ESX(i) 4.1 hosts you may see some slowness when trying to do things like Storage vMotion, Deploy from Template, etc…basically things that leverage HardwareAcceleratedMove.

So how do you fix it?  First thing is you need to disable HardwareAcceleratedMove, instructions on how to do this can be found in VMware KB1033665. Next thing is to contact EMC Support and have the ePack that engineering released for this problem installed on your VMAX. Then finally, contact VMware support for their hotfix…rumor has it that a VMware support bundle should be released sometime soon. After you have the patch for VMAX as well as vSphere you should have no problem turning HardwareAcceleratedMove back on.

So to wrap this up….VAAI issue when mixed with VMAX, but it doesn’t affect all VAAI functionality, just XCOPY (HardwareAcceleratedMove) and even then it doesn’t affect every single operation. Get the patches, get them installed and get back on schedule!

Created on June 14, 2011 by Rick Scherer

Posted under Storage, vSphere.

This blog has 354 views and one response.

Tags: Bug, vaai, vmax, vsphere, xcopy

(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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