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VMware just announced a new addition to their vCloud product family; vCloud Integration Manager.
vCloud Integration Manager was developed to provide a simple and standardized way for service providers to provision vCloud Director, vShield and vSphere in order to more quickly get new customers up and running on a cloud service. Until now, service providers either had to do these tasks manually, or redirect valuable software development resources to writing undifferentiated “glue code” and/or automation scripts.
Integration Manager reduces operational costs by automatically stepping through the configuration process for vCloud Director to set up Virtual Data Centers, virtual networks, administrator accounts and other cloud resources that the customer has ordered. By completing this in a matter of minutes, it decreases time to revenue (the time between receiving an order for service and fulfilling it, and therefore being able to bill for service).
Integration Manager includes a full set of REST APIs and a web GUI. The GUI provides an administrator interface to define the service building blocks that make up a full cloud service for a customer. Administrators can also configure reseller accounts, and provision and de-provision customers.
Read the full press release here.
Wednesday, 08 February 2012 02:19
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Tuesday, 07 February 2012 20:26
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Twitter is one of the webservices I deeply admire; simple, easy and scaled to the heavens. They did a review of 2011 with statistics that reaffirm that scalability. A few examples:
- UEFA Champions League: 6,303 tweets per second
- MTV VMA: 8,868 tweets per second
- Steve Jobs’ passing: 6,049 tweets per second
Sunday, 15 January 2012 20:37
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A lot of people are saying the VCAP4-DCA and VCP5 are hard to pass. After taking the VCAP4-DCA late October and the VCP5 late December, I was wondering why there are so many warnings; passing didn’t seem too hard. Maybe it’s the practical vs. theoretical clubs, but if you administer an enterprise or service provider VMware environment using several basic techniques like HA, DRS, network or fiber-channel storage, both are really doable.
Either way, to pass these exams, you definitely need to have handson experience. If a test environment is not an option, explore on the environment you do have at hand. I’m not an advocate of testing in production environments, but you can do a lot in a cluster without actually breaking the VMs. Just reading the documentation is not going to get you there.
The VCAP4-DCA exam is performed in a live test lab that VMware will set up for you, so be ready to configure and test. The surprise that I got was that they actually requested a lot of performance charts & powercli (?!); don’t skip stuff on the blueprint.
The VCP5 exam is pretty different than VCP4, for the better. VCP4 focussed a lot of stuff you can get from theory, like maximums & minimums. VCP5 however was more technical questions and less on the theory. Meaning you can get to think.
Most of all, try to have fun when you’re sitting down to do these, it makes it easier. Picture how you would configure something, then pick the right answer.
Resources:
- VCAP4-DCA Blueprint: http://mylearn.vmware.com/register.cfm?course=70779
- VCP5 Blueprint: http://mylearn.vmware.com/register.cfm?course=103110
- http://thesaffageek.co.uk/vcp5/
- http://cosonok.blogspot.com/2011/10/vcp510-vcp-on-vsphere-5-exam-cram-notes.html
- http://vinfrastructure.it/certifications-on-virtualization/vcp/vcp5/
Mock exams:
- Simon Long: http://www.simonlong.co.uk/blog/vcp5-practice-exams/
- VMware: http://mylearn.vmware.com/mgrSurvey/assess.cfm?item=24908&user=0&refer=0&p=0&ui=www_cert
Either way, to pass these exams, you definitely need to have handson experience. If a test environment is not an option, explore on the environment you do have at hand. I’m not an advocate of testing in production environments, but you can do a lot in a cluster without actually breaking the VMs. Just reading the documentation is not going to get you there.
The VCAP4-DCA exam is performed in a live test lab that VMware will set up for you, so be ready to configure and test. The surprise that I got was that they actually requested a lot of performance charts & powercli (?!); don’t skip stuff on the blueprint.
The VCP5 exam is pretty different than VCP4, for the better. VCP4 focussed a lot of stuff you can get from theory, like maximums & minimums. VCP5 however was more technical questions and less on the theory. Meaning you can get to think.
Most of all, try to have fun when you’re sitting down to do these, it makes it easier. Picture how you would configure something, then pick the right answer.
Resources:
- VCAP4-DCA Blueprint: http://mylearn.vmware.com/register.cfm?course=70779
- VCP5 Blueprint: http://mylearn.vmware.com/register.cfm?course=103110
- http://thesaffageek.co.uk/vcp5/
- http://cosonok.blogspot.com/2011/10/vcp510-vcp-on-vsphere-5-exam-cram-notes.html
- http://vinfrastructure.it/certifications-on-virtualization/vcp/vcp5/
Mock exams:
- Simon Long: http://www.simonlong.co.uk/blog/vcp5-practice-exams/
- VMware: http://mylearn.vmware.com/mgrSurvey/assess.cfm?item=24908&user=0&refer=0&p=0&ui=www_cert
Friday, 28 October 2011 23:33
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When installing various VMware products that link into vCenter (vShield, vCloud Connector, vChargeback, I could go on..), you often have minimal control over what URL is actually used to browse to the plugin and you usually can’t change it later on. This can screw up your SSL certificate plans.
After a little digging, I found these tables in the SQL database:
- VPX_EXT_CLIENT
- VPX_EXT_SERVER
Both have a field called ‘URL’ which has the URL (doh) to the plugin.
Two things; this is not supported by VMware and could break something. I hasn’t on my setup, but it might on yours. Backups are your friend.
You need to stop the vCenter service before you edit the value and start it back up after you’re done.
Saturday, 15 October 2011 18:58
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A love for Apple’s OSX and computing devices brings some side effects. One of them is that you’re stuck with VMware Fusion which is way behind it’s Windows counterpart, VMware Workstation. Fusion cannot import .ovf VMs, just .vmx VMs. In my case, I needed to convert the vSphere Management Appliance to a VM that could run in VMware Fusion.
It took me a while to this neat tool: http://communities.vmware.com/community/vmtn/server/vsphere/automationtools/ovf -Â ovftool is a utility that can convert virtual machines between certain formats.
Once you have it downloaded and installed, you can use the commandline tool to convert the .ovf to a .vmx like this:
ovftool --acceptAllEulas vMA-4.1.0.0-268837.ovf vMA.vmx
Then just double click or import the .vmx into Fusion
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