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VMware announced a promtion to get free VMware Alive VM when you purchase an eligible VMware vSphere product.  The promotion indicates you can receive VMware Alive VM allowing you to manage up to 50 virtual machines and one year of basic support at nor additional charge.  This is a great way to get in on a production product without any additional investment.

As I stated a few days ago with the release of VMware Alive 7.2, Alive is a uniquely designed product that enables the VM administrator to have a comprehensive view of the overall performance of their complete vSphere environment.

  • Indicators of health, workload and capacity
  • Heat maps to easily locate trouble areas
  • Mapping of virtual machines to host to cluster and datacenter to get to root cause analysis
  • Trending and analytics for quick and effective problem solving

To qualify, you must purchase an eligible product between Nov 23, 2010 and March 1, 2011.

Promotion Details: http://www.vmware.com/landing_pages/vsphere-promotion/
Eligible products for vSphere Promotion

SecPoint releases their WPA Penetrator as a VM that can be run from almost any Laptop.

WPA Cracking VMware Portable Penetrator from secpoint on Vimeo.

WPA Cracking VMware Portable Penetrator.
The Portable Penetrator now runs on VMware

http://www.secpoint.com/wpa-crack-portable-penetrator-vmware.html

Another quick release note. vCenter Configuration Manager 5.4 released yesterday.

Downloads available here:
http://downloads.vmware.com/d/info/datacenter_downloads/vmware_vcenter_configuration_manager/5_0

The Integrian Alive product was offically released as a VMware product today as Vmware Alive Enterprise 7.2.

VAE 7.2 Download Page:
http://downloads.vmware.com/d/details/vae_7_2/ZEB0YnRlaGViZGoqZA==

Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman have been working hard on delivering a book on called VMware vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS Technical deepdive (Volume 1).  Their hard work has paid off and their book is available this week through Amazon and CreateSpace!  I saw Jason Boche just picked his copy up yesterday and I just placed my order.
Here are some details on the book!  It looks great Duncan and Frank!

VMware vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS Technical Deepdive zooms in on two key components of every VMware based infrastructure and is by no means a “how to” guide. It covers the basic steps needed to create a VMware HA and DRS cluster, but even more important explains the concepts and mechanisms behind HA and DRS which will enable you to make well educated decisions. This book will take you in to the trenches of HA and DRS and will give you the tools to understand and implement e.g. HA admission control policies, DRS resource pools and resource allocation settings. On top of that each section contains basic design principles that can be used for designing, implementing or improving VMware infrastructures.

Coverage includes:

  • HA node types
  • HA isolation detection and response
  • HA admission control
  • VM Monitoring
  • HA and DRS integration
  • DRS imbalance algorithm
  • Resource Pools
  • Impact of reservations and limits
  • CPU Resource Scheduling
  • Memory Scheduler
  • DPM

Praise for the HA and DRS technical deepdive:

Marc Sevigny (senior staff engineer VMware HA group): “Duncan Epping’s intimate knowledge of VMware HA internals, plus his experience working with HA installations in a wide range of configurations make him the de facto HA guru. Anyone considering or using VMware HA should become one of his devout followers.”

Anne Holler (senior staff engineer VMware Distributed group): “Frank Denneman has extensive knowledge and experience across a wide range of VMware products from ESX to vCenter to  DRS. He has written an indispensable reference for using and understanding DRS and DPM.”

VMware vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS Technical deepdive (Volume 1)

LG and VMware have announced the relationship to develop a cellular phone capable of running two unique hand set systems on the same device. This enables a true Employee Owned or Bring Your Own Device (BYO Device) business model for business where employees can buy their own phone and manage their own phone number om a platform while still allowing the Enterprise to manage a corporate profile on the same device.

LG and VMware have announced the relationship to develop a cellular phone capable of running two unique hand set systems on the same device. This enables a true Employee Owned or Bring Your Own Device (BYO Device) business model for business where employees can buy their own phone and manage their own phone number on a platform while still allowing the Enterprise to manage a corporate profile on the same device.

Maybe someday I can have all the sexiness of an iPhone and the customization and choices of Android with the corporate management of a Blackberry.

Emerging Devices:
http://communities.vmware.com/blogs/cto-srinivas/2010/12/07/vmw-partners-with-lg-to-bring-virtualization-to-smartphones

 Maybe some day I can have all the sexiness of an iPhone and the customization and choices of Android with the corporate management of a Blackberry.

Emerging Devices:
http://communities.vmware.com/blogs/cto-srinivas/2010/12/07/vmw-partners-with-lg-to-bring-virtualization-to-smartphones

Q4 2010 Minneapolis Area VMware Users Group meeting
Friday December 17th, 2010 1:00 – 5:00 PM

Jason Boche, Minneapolis area VMUG leader – Email:  jason@boche.net

1:00 – 1:15 General business, Updates, Open Floor Discussions
1:15 – 2:00 Presentation: Chris Grossmeier/Jeff Whitman, VMware, Inc.: “VMware Updates – vCloud Director/vCloud request Manager”
2:00 – 2:10 Break
2:10 – 2:55 Security Presentation: Edward Haletky, The Virtualization Practice, LLC: “Security Threats and How the Hypervisor Protects itself”
2:55 – 3:05 Break
3:05 – 3:50 Security Presentation: Ken Sigel, Systems Engineer, Hytrust, Inc.: “Virtualize compliance-related workloads with the help of HyTrust Appliance”
3:50 – 4:00 Break
4:00 – 4:45 Case Study Presentation: Paul Gerth: “Lab Manager at Siemens PLM Software”
4:45 – 5:00 Q & A, Door Prizes, Closing

Stick around to win great door prizes!
(Please bring business cards to enter your name in the door prize drawings)
Meeting Location, Snacks, and door prizes provided by Train Signal, Inc., HyTrust, Inc., The Virtualization Practice, LLC, and VMware, Inc.

  • http://trainsignal.com/ – Computer Training Videos – Microsoft, VMware, Cisco, CompTIA & more!
  • http://hytrust.com/ – The leader in policy management, access control, and audit logging for virtual infrastructure
  • http://astroarch.com/ – Consulting, development, and training services for all aspects of the Internet, Security, and Virtualization
  • http://www.vmware.com/ – The planet’s most innovative virtualization solutions ever

Meeting Location:
Hilton Minneapolis/Bloomington
3900 American Boulevard West
Bloomington, MN  55437
952-893-9500

http://www1.hilton.com/en_US/hi/hotel/MSPBWHF-Hilton-Minneapolis-Bloomington-Minnesota/index.do

Somehow I missed this announcement last week!  VMware vCenter CapacityIQ 1.5 released on Dec. 2nd, 2010.

vCenter CapacityIQ 1.5. CapacityIQ helps customers analyze, optimize and forecast capacity in their vSphere environments. This release adds compelling new capabilities around storage and reporting:

  • Storage Analytics – visibility into storage capacity, forecast, bottlenecks via disk space and storage I/O trending
  • Resource Optimizations  – storage aware workload modeling and what-if scenarios, detection of constrained and underutilized hosts and outlier detection
  • Scheduled Reports – automated delivery of capacity utilization and optimization reports

https://www.vmware.com/products/vcenter-capacityiq/

On December 1st, VMware released an updated PowerCLI.  The new CLI introduces  new commands for features such as :

  • ESXCLI functionality is now available directly through a new Get-EsxCli cmdlet
  • Esxtop statistics through a Get-EsxTop cmdlet
  • Enhanced vDS support
  • Support for vCenter Server alarms
  • Various host storage enhancements
  • Encrypted credential store

Some of the features I am excited to see include:

  • Wait Tools : Allow you to wait for VMware Tools of the specified virtual machines to load before proceeding.
  • Added support for querying disk and disk partition information of hosts through the Get-VMHostDisk and Get-VMHostDiskPartition cmdlets.
  • Added support for converting hard disks from Thin to Thick and vice versa through theDiskStorageFormat parameter of Move-VM.

In all, this should make scripting and automating builds and labs much easier!

PowerCLI 4.1.1 Documentation

The full PowerCLI 4.1.1 Changelog

Download the PowerCLI 4.1.1 Code

Remember: If you need to do a task more than twice, script it!