Manitoba VMUG Meeting (Oct 24, 2012) - Recap

I would like to begin by saying thanks to all the MB VMUG members who attended. It was great to see the interest in the learning that the MB VMUG provides through special speakers, and the technical presentations.

We kicked off the meeting with the MB VMUG Leader presentation and Anil Sedha spoke about VMUG in general, VMUG advantage membership, MB VMUG workspace, and the new stuff happening within the group.

For those of you who missed it - those in attendance were informed that we'll be getting our new website soon, the launch of a Quarterly newsletter, hands on lab coming soon, and the VCP5 study group (special announcement) is being launched. 

As our group grows it is now time to move towards getting a professional website that will provide value to our programs and increase sponsorship. All local blogs by VMWare Professionals in Manitoba will be displayed on it, and educational content will be posted in addition to the blog. Secondly, a quarterly newsletter will be issued starting Q1 2013 and anyone interested in submitting articles is welcome to do so prior to the deadline of November 30, 2012. Articles should have a core focus on VMWare or associated technologies, independent, free of marketing verbiage, and limited to 800 words. Finally, interests are now being received for the MB VMUG vSphere 5 Study Group. Attempts are being made to get sponsorships for study material and exam certification fees. Those interested to take part in the study group are invited to get in touch with me through LinkedIn or sending me an email on manitoba@vmug.com.

This presentation was followed by our key speaker - Mike Laverick (Senior VMWare Evangelist) who spoke remotely and gave an excellent presentation about his vCD setup in a personal lab environment and how this environment can be simulated in our organizations for learning/testing. There were some great insights as he went about explaining his setup. A video of his presentation will be posted later for review again considering we had some audio hiccups.

Keith Aasen from NetApp followed up after Mike and took off straight away with his VMWorld Top 10 session about storage performance and troubleshooting performance issues. His session provided a deep dive into the kind of performance issues that can arise during disk performance problems and how he and his customer methodically approached and resolved the issue. Keith got the group going with his Q/A and had a very interactive session.

After a short break for networking and coffee our very own Scott Jordan (VMWare SE) began his presentation on vCloud Suite features and licensing. He covered a wide range of topics ranging from the informational release of the product, edition comparision, feature set, and licensing models. Scott spoke about the comparative differences between the current release and the vCloud suite. He also gave an insight into the upgrade steps and the Fair Market compensation introduced by VMWare for vCloud suite. An important note was that after Aug 27, 2012, VMWare has changed Fair Market compensation to be at 90% of the existing list price for products that a customer already owns. More details can be taken directly by reaching out to Scott or myself and I can guide to VMWare's statement on it.

In conclusion I reminded everyone that feedback is very necessary for planning purposes and it helps the group if everyone participated in discussions on LinkedIn, as well as gave their input to the Polls that have been posted. We spoke about general timings of the MB VMUG meeting - morning versus evening and the general consensus was to hold the meeting during morning time since more people are able to attend and take time off from work considering that there is significant learning for the professional VMWare community.

In my closing remarks I also mentioned that in between our quarterly VMUG meetings there are plans to introduce an online technical session/demonstration that would facilitate remote learning from the comfortness of your office and would add value. Whether we do a lab/demo/technical session will be determined in due course once I start getting the senior vSpecialists involved. This online session will be attempted using Google Hangout as there is great potential in using social media for MB VMUG's benefit.

Finally, there were the prizes/giveways for things ranging from technical books/DVD's to promotional items. It is pleasing to say that every member in attendance who stayed until the end walked away with something useful.

The giveaways were - 

• Highly popular Books, DVD's, T-shirt/Cap from David Davis of TrainSignal 
• Books, vSphere Reference Charts, and promotional items from VMUG HQ
• Books from O'Reilly User Group Publications. O'Reilly also offered a free e-book to all our members in attendance. Those who attended but did not give their email address are requested to do so asap in order to receive the free e-book (limited to members in attendance only).
• Promotional items from VMWorld 2012 (courtesy VMUG for t-shirts and vendors like Red Hat and Symantec)

Last but not the least - a BIG thank you to our sponsors. No important event really gets successful without active participation and support of its sponsors. We had great support from NETAPP (Gold Sponsor), Arista (Silver Sponsor), and Onx (Bronze Sponsor) and thank them again for all the help.

Follow Manitoba VMUG on Twitter - http://twitter.com/manitobavmug

Manitoba VMUG Workspace - http://www.vmug.com/manitoba

LinkedIn Page - http://www.linkedin.com/groups?gid=3820802

To sponsor the MB VMUG activities or meetings please contact Anil Sedha through LinkedIn, or via email - manitoba@vmug.com

Oct 24, 2012 meeting sponsors (logo):

VMware Mirage Available for Download Now - Eric Sloof

VMware Mirage offers a unique solution for endpoint management and recovery that combines image centralization and local execution. The images of the endpoints are cloned into the datacenter to enable the benefits of centralized management and recovery while leaving cached copies of the image on each endpoint for local (and offline) execution thereby preserving an uncompromised user experience.

Mirage centralizes the full desktop contents at the datacenter for management and protection purposes, distributes the execution of desktop workloads to the endpoints for superior user experience, and optimizes the synchronization in between. Mirage conceptually splits the PC into six layers, divided into two groups: IT centrally managed and user managed. The first group consists of a Base Image Layer, a Driver Library Layer, and a Departmental Application Layer (experimental). The second group consists of User-Application Layer, Machine Identity Layer and User Data Settings Layer.
These layers form an individually managed, centrally stored Centralized Virtual Desktop (CVD). CVDs are hardware-agnostic and can be easily migrated from one desktop (physical or virtual) to another, creating a wide range of use cases. The Mirage Client runs a copy of this CVD directly on the end point, so users can work offline, use processor-intensive applications, and enjoy predictable, native PC performance regardless of network connectivity.
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The Mirage architecture includes VMware Mirage Server in the datacenter to centralize desktop management and protection; Mirage Client to create a local cache for optimal user experience at the endpoint, and advanced WAN optimization technology to speed bi-directional synchronization over the WAN.

http://www.vmware.com/products/desktop_virtualization/mirage.html

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Free vCenter Operations Manager Now Included with vSphere - Eric Sloof

vCenter Operations Manager Foundation will give you insights and visibility into performance and health of your vSphere infrastructure and is now included free with VMware vSphere.
VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite<http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vcenter/VMware-vCenter-Operations-DS-EN1.pdf> provides automated operations management using patented analytics and an integrated approach to performance, capacity and configuration management.

vCenter Operations Management Suite enables IT organizations to get better visibility and actionable intelligence to proactively ensure service levels, optimum resource usage and configuration compliance in dynamic virtual and cloud environments.
vCenter Operations Manager Foundation<http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/vcenter/VMware-vCenter-Operations-DS-EN1.pdf> is the new, entry-level edition of the vCenter Operations Management Suite. It gains deep operational insights and visibility to improve the performance and health of your vSphere environment. vCenter Operations Manager Foundation is included with every vSphere edition free of charge.
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vSphere Data Protection (VDP) and vSphere Replication (VR) Interoperability - VMware vSphere Blog

We have been getting a fair number of questions regarding interoperability of vSphere Data Protection (VDP) and vSphere Replication (VR) both of which are included with vSphere 5.1 (Essentials Plus and higher). I spent some time in my lab with these questions and decided to focus on the two most common questions: 1. Does VDP and VR interfere with each other? 2. Can I use VR to replicate VDP to another site?

For the first question/scenario, I set up replication for three virtual machines (VMs). With VR, you can set the Recovery Point Objective (RPO) within the range of 15 minutes to 24 hours. I chose 15 minutes for all three VMs to maximize the frequency of VR operations against the VMs. I also made sure that one of the VMs was performing an initial sync. The initial sync in VR is when the entire VM is being replicated from the source to the target location for the first time. Once the initial sync is complete, only the changes to the VM are replicated to minimize bandwidth usage and maintain RPO policy compliance. Having VMs with VR performing an initial sync and regular (lightweight delta) syncs allowed testing against both replication status types. Having both replication status types running in the environment, I then ran several manually backup jobs using VDP. These jobs consisted of both the initial full (entire VM) backup and the subsequent synthetic full (changed blocks) backups. VDP and VR performed well together. The only hint of an issue that I saw was a warning message stating that replication for a VM is not active. This occurred when I manually started a replication cycle and a backup at the same time. The warning went away within a minute or two and I found no evidence that either job had any failures. VDP reported a successful backup and VR reported "OK" for the replication status a few minutes later suggesting VR simply retried replication. I also let the environment "simmer" for a few days leaving the RPO setting for the VMs at 15 minutes and VDP running its scheduled backup jobs for the same VMs once per day. Again, no evidence of issues.

For the second question/scenario, I configured VR to replicate the VDP appliance and set the RPO to its most aggressive setting of 15 minutes. I configured replication during the middle of the day. At that time, the backup window was closed and scheduled to open at 8:00 PM. The initial sync completed fine, as expected. However, once the backup window opened and the scheduled backups started, a warning message was logged: "System has paused replication for virtual machine vSphere Data Protection on host in cluster Cluster in Datacenter: Disk added to VM". As part of the backup process, VDP (along with several other backup and recovery solutions) utilizes the SCSI HotAdd functionality of vSphere to improve backup job efficiency and to keep backup traffic off of the network. The .vmdk being backed up is dynamically attached to the VDP appliance while the backup is occurring. VR detected the addition of the .vmdk file and paused. Replication of the VDP appliance was paused indefinitely and required manual intervention to reconfigure replication for the VDP appliance. This issue occurred every time the backup window opened. The RPO could be changed to make the replication occur less frequently – perhaps a RPO policy somewhere between 18 and 24 hours – thus reducing the chance replication will occur when backup jobs are running. This still does not guarantee that VR will not attempt to replicate changes to the VDP appliance at the same time backup jobs are running.

In summary, there appears to be no issues with both VR and VDP protecting a VM. In contrast, it is not recommended to use VR to replicate a VDP appliance. In an upcoming article, I will look at recovering VDP from a (non-VR) replicated or cloned copy of the VDP appliance. Stay tuned…

blogs.vmware.com [X] <http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2012/10/vdp-and-vr-interoperability.html> |by Jeff Hunter on October 15, 2012
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Building VMware End-User Computing Solutions with VMware View Book - RTFM Education – Virtualization, VMware, Citrix

Phew. I know it's a long title. But I wanted to shoehorn the word "end-user computing" and Barry wanted "VMware View" in the title – so this is the mash-up we can up with.

It's our joint pleasure to finally make available the end-user computing book that myself, and fellow vExpert, Barry Coombs – have been work in on for sometime. We never thought when we embarked on the project that it would take this length of time. That was partly caused by us both having other projects on the table, and the review process colliding with the release of VMware View 5.1 and ThinApp 4.7.2. It was also delayed by my sojourns into other complementary technologies such as vShield, Teradici APEX, ThinApp Factory and Horizon Application Manager.

I do I'd like to thank my co-author, Barry Coombs. It was Barry who approached me shortly after completing my SRM 5.0 book with the idea to update my old View 4.5 guide to be View 4.6 piece. Back then it was small under-taking to retro fit the book with the new support for the "PCoIP Gateway Mode". Then quite quickly it became clear that with View 5.0 being released we might as well go the whole hog. Anyway, without Barry's interested I might have not even bothered with this book. Also I wanted to recognise that where I have the luxury of bags of free time during the day to write – Barry has to hold down a proper job, and house move at the same time. Well done, Barry!

We'd both like to take this opportunity to thank everyone one who has assisted in bringing this text to the Community.

We spent many long dark nights toiling away in our man-caves to complete this project. Barry would like to thank his wife Laura Coombs, and I would like to thank his long-term partner, Carmel Edwards – for all their support and patience during this time.

From VMware would like to thank – Spencer Pitts, Peter von Oven, Peter Björk, Christoph Harding and Matthew Northam. Additionally I would like to thank Aaron Black, Jared Cook, Alejandro Guzman, Alan LaMielle and Deam Flaming who helped greatly with the ThinApp Factory and Horizon Application Manager chapters.

We would also like to thank Paul Pindel of F5 Networks, Andrei Valentin of BitDefender and Elcio Mello of Teradici.

Finally, we would like to thank all the people in the vExperts Community and elsewhere who assisted in the review process including: Duco Jaspars, Gabrie Van Zantan, Chris Mohn, Jonathan Medd, Rick Al Eqesem, Bas Raayman, Jane Rimmer, Stu McHugh, Ivo Beerens, Chris Deardon, Bilal Hashmi, James Bowling, Brian Jordon, Shane Williford, Andrew Hancock, Brian Suhr, Alex Muetstege, Dan Berkowitz, Matt Murray, Ryan Makamson, Julian Wood, Tim Myers, Matthew Northam, Alan Renouf, Michael Letschin and Kong L. Yang.

As special thanks goes to Christian Mohn who wrote the forward to the book.

For the now the book is only available on LULU as both a hard-copy or as PDF format. Given the length of the book and shipping costs incurred from LULU we would recommend downloading the PDF. Remember most e-readers support PDF or you can find tools that convert PDF into the format from your selected e-reader. The PDF is $10 to download – and there's a $10 royality charge on the hard-copy. These royalties will be paid to UNICEF as charitable donation after 1 year. It doesn't matter what you buy – the royality charge is the same. Of course the PDF isn't secured – but if people do see this winding up on other website. Let us know and we apply the usual community pressure.

We are also working on getting the book into the iBookStore, and via my contacts with Pearson Publishing – we are hoping to get it distributed on Safari Books Online too. That's very much a "work in progress"…

This may well be my last book for sometime. Believe it or not I've been solidly writing in the long form ever since I published my first "Admin" guides to ESX 2.x and VirtualCenter 1.x back in 2003/4. We'd would love to be able to keep this book up to date – we'd love to add AppBlast and Octopus when they are released. I'm sure Barry would be more than interested in working again with another author when View 6.0 rolls around the corner. As Barry and I are the sole copyright owners we are very flexible on this – I personally would love to see the book go online and be maintained and developed by the community. I think the days of technical material in paper books that are sealed in amber are rapidly drawing to a close.

Lastly, I recognise that there maybe people who are interested in ThinApp Factory<http://communities.vmware.com/docs/DOC-20095> and Horizon Application Manger<http://communities.vmware.com/thread/413086> – who have no interest in VMware View. I've decide to let these chapters be available separately as free download as well.

The book both in PDF is available NOW. The hard-copy will be online once me and Barry have recieved our personal copy and we are happy with the production quality.<http://www.lulu.com/spotlight/rtfm>

As with the VMware Site Recovery Manager 4.0 books all royalities will be donated to our chosen charity of UNICEF.

Enjoy!

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