vFrank

Essense of virtualization

Ultimate New Year’s Resolution from Veeam

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Exclusively for the virtualization community, Veeam raffles great prizes that will improve IT Pros daily working experience!

Join the raffle and be fully equipped for 2014!

Register now to get one of the following prizes:

  • Tablet of your choice: Android, iPad or Surface
  • Class of your choice: Microsoft Training or VMware Education Services course
  • Event of your choice: TechEd or VMworld in your geography (pass, no travel)
  • Home lab with HP and Netgear products: one mega server, ReadyNAS Pro, SSDs and amazing WiFi router
  • Software kit: MSDN subscription, Veeam NFR licenses and VMware vSphere

Make sure to register before Dec. 24 to enter raffle!

You can check out the competition here: http://go.veeam.com/ultimate-new-years-resolution.html

Blog Status on vFrank.org November 2013

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A few months ago I was mentoring Rasmus Haslund on his first delivery of a VMware vSphere Fast Track Course in Iceland. During the week we had a lot of time to discuss work and what we wanted to achieve. One of our goals was to make it in to the vSphere Top 50 in 2014 on vsphere-land. To get there we knew that we needed to create quality content. Since September I have been extremely busy trying to accomplish this. Some of the articles that helped to grow the number of visitors are:

How to log in to Single Sign ON SSO in vSphere 5.5

Free VMware VCA Certification Voucher!

Understanding VMware Reservations Limits and Shares

Understanding VMware Ballooning

Take a look at my blog statistics week-by-week. It really makes a difference when you are serious.blogvisitors

 

I want to thank my visitors for coming to my site. Thanks for all of the comments. And a very big thank has to go out to my blog sponsors. During the last months I have been so lucky to be sponsored by

Unitrends – Who makes a very competitive backup solution for VMware. [Unitrends]

Zerto – You must check them out if you are looking into disaster recovery. They are much more than VMware SRM [Zerto]

Zitcom – A Danish hosting provider. They have some very talented guys managing their servers. I would have no problem to have my services hosted at them. [Zitcom]

Veeam – Requires no introduction. Great product for virtual machine backups that continue to grow. [Veeam]

Time for new challenges vFrank Consulting is born

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During the last 5 years I have been working for Arrow ECS as a VMware Certified Instructor and consultant. It has been the best job I have had. I have great colleagues and I want to thank the current VMware team at Arrow Daniel Massot, Annette Jakobsen, Jakob Will Thomsen and Rasmus Haslund for great cooperation during this time. Also a big thank you to Karsten Bundgaard and Thomas Hagedorn. These guys (and one girl) are not only good colleagues but also good friends today.

Some of the key highlights my time at Arrow:

  • VMware Certified Instructor Pioneer of new courses award 2010
  • VMware Certified Instructor of the Quarter (Q2) 2012
  • A lot of VMware certifications including VCAP-DCD, VCAP-DCA, VCAP-CID
  • VMworld Speaker 2013 in San Francisco (VCM4555) and Barcelona (VCM5100)

Even though I have a great job with great colleagues it is time for me to move on to new challenges. My next challenge will be to start my own company vFrank Consulting. I will be independent from December 1st. 2013. In my new company I want to focus on what I do best, consultancy work and deliver VMware training. By being independent I will be able to go to the customers for longer time engagements. Something I have not been able to do today.

My goals for 2014 and vFrank Consulting

  • Submit and defend a VCDX design
  • VMworld Speaker 2014 on vC Ops
  • Have fun, work a lot and learn lot 🙂

Can’t wait to get started.

vC Ops: Building a Dashboard Based on Super Metrics

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If you have been looking into vCenter Operations Manager you have probably heard about Super Metrics, Dashboards and the Custom UI. In this article I will help you build your own dashboard that uses a super metric. The high level approach to this:

  1. Create super metric packages and add the metric packages to your inventory
  2. Build a super metric and add the super metric to a super metric package
  3. Build a dashboard that uses the super metric

1. Create super metric packages and add the metric packages to your inventory

A lot of different guides I have seen starts by building the super metrics. I think it makes more sense to start by building empty super metrics packages and apply them to your inventory. My suggestion is the following approach. Build super metric packages based on different levels.

  • Host Super Metric Package
  • Cluster Super Metric Package
  • Virtual Machine Super Metric Package
  • Datastore Super Metric Package
  • etc.

Then when you build your super metrics you add them to the group they belong, and after a few minutes data should be available in the inventory.  To build your package groups start by logging in to the vC Ops custom ui. In my environment the URL is: https://vcopsuivm.vclass.local/vcops-custom

Then go to Environment – Super Metrics – Package editor 

After creating your package groups you should see a screen similiar to this

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Now we need to add the packages to our inventory. We need to do two steps for this. One is to add it to existing objects and another is to add it to future objects. For instance when you add a new host to cluster you want the super metric package to be applied to that host automatically.

To add the host super metric package go to Environment – Environment Overview – Resource Kinds – Host Systems 

The select all hosts (if you want the super metric on all hosts and click “edit” and add the Host Super Metric Package to the objects. This means that whenever you create a new super metric for a host just add it to the correct super metric package and it will start to work right away!

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Do the same for you Cluster, Datastore and Virtual Machine super metric packages.

The second step we can add is to make sure the super metric packages will also work on new objects, for instance new hosts og newly created virtual machines.

Go to Environment – Configuration – Resource Kinds Defaults and configure it like the screenshot

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Now we are ready to start building our Super Metrics

 

2. Build a super metric and add the super metric to a super metric package

I have borrowed an example of a Super Metric from the following pdf the super metric we want to build is to find the virtual machine with the highest amount of Memory Ballooning in KB. To do this we need to use the metric “Memory Balloon (KB)” and the function maxN in vC Ops. 

Go to Environment – Super Metrics – and create a new Super Metric. Look at the screenshot

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After creating the super metric then go to the super metric packages and add it to the “Cluster Super Metric Package”

Now you just need to wait at least 5 minutes for the metric to start appearing. The easiest way to verify it is working is to to the normal vC Ops user interface, select your cluster, operations, all metric and look under the super metric category

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When you see data in the Metric Chart you are ready to go to the next step which is to add it to a dashboard.

3. Build a dashboard that uses the super metric

There are many guides out there showing how to build your own dashboards. In this configuration I build a dashboard with two “Generic Scoreboard Widgets” and two “Metric Sparklines”

sm6 

And the END result

sm7

Free vSphere Design Pocketbook

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During this years VMworld I was so lucky to get a signed hard copy of the vSphere Design Pocketbook. It is a vSphere design book in with all its design recommendations in “tweet factor”. The book is sponsored by Pernixdata

The good news is that if you did not go to VMworld you can have the book for free as an ebook. Just sign-up here

The book is written by top bloggers and people from the virtualization community. I highly recommend it.

pernixbook

Free VMware VCA Certification Voucher!

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Good news for everybody. VMware Education really want to push adoption of the new VCA certifications. I blogged about the certification a few days ago here 

In short the VCA is an entry level official certification from VMware. It fits just below the normal VCP. the VCA is available for three tracks: Datacenter Virtualization, Cloud and EUC. You can do the certification from home or work. You just need a web browser!

Normally there is a fee for the exam. But all through January the following code should work. 

The coupon code is: VMRT6B404C7B (Expires January 31st) (50% discount)

UPDATE: It is not possible to get 100% discount anymore. But the key above will give you 50%

You can sign up for the relevant VCA certifications here: http://vmware.com/certification 

The VMware Certified Associate  certification is a great opportunity to show you have skills in both Datacenter, Cloud and EUC

 I took the VCA-DCV and VCA-Cloud using the above key and passed it. All done in less than one hour and it was free.

 

Clean up VMware Snapshot

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Snapshots is a very strong but dangerous feature in a VMware virtual environment. You have the option to save a virtual machines state and later revert to it. 

It is a general best practice to “delete” the snapshots after a predefined time period (for instance 7 days) if you are not using them. Sometimes backup products or administrators create snapshots without cleaning them up. If you find a virtual machine with snapshots and you know they should not be there what do you do?

Simple answer: Delete All

If the current state of the virtual machine is what you want just hit the “delete all” button. It will make sure to consolidate all snapshots in the chain you are in. If you have snapshots in another chain they will just be deleted. 

Be very careful with the “Go to” button. If you hit it you will go to that state and the current state you are in will be lost. If you want to be able to go back to where you are now, then take a new snapshot before you revert to a prior.

Remember snapshots are basically delta.vmdk files on a datastore. They are like a thin provisioned disk and can grow to the same size as its parent file. That is why you need extra disk space for snapshots and why you should clean them up if you don’t need them.

snapshot

How To Enable Traffic Filtering on Distributed Switch in vSphere 5.5

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A cool new feature on a Distributed Switch in vSphere 5.5  is the ability filter and tag traffic on a Port Group level. This capability is also referred to as access control lists (ACLs), and it is used to provide port-level security. You can create rules of the following qualifiers:

  • MAC Source Address and Destination Address qualifiers
  • System traffic qualifiers – vSphere vMotion, vSphere management, vSphere FT, etc.
  • IP qualifiers – Protocol type, IP SA, IP DA, and port number

When a Package has been classified you can choose to either filter or tag the packets. It is very simple to implement this feature.

Step 1: Create a new vSphere 5.5 Distributed Switch or upgrade an existing. Your ESXi hosts need to be running 5.5 to be able to participate in a 5.5 dvSwitch.

Step 2: Create a port group or go to an existing.

Step 3: Right click the port group and “edit settings” – then go to “Traffic filtering and marking” 

trafficfiterdrop

 

Step 4: Enable the feature. Then create what ever rule you feel like. In my environment I created a rule to drop ICMP packages with a destination of 192.168.2.10 (my DNS server).

trafficfilterdrop2

 

 

After enabling the rule my virtual machine immediately stopped getting ICMP replies.

trafficfilterdrop3