Hello all,

so first of all apologies if someone has already come with the vTalk name, I’m not very original today and that’s the only thing which came to my mind I would like to interview prominent members of the VMware Community worldwide, and due to geographic vicinity I will start the series with my friend and fellow VMware vExpert Karel Novak. We haven’t had a chance to sit for a beer, but the communication was intense as always!

Karel Novak, Czech Republic, VMware vExpert 2012 & 2013

Yesterday, VMware announced the availability of a new product, VMware vCenter Log Insight. If browsing through various ESXi and vCenter logs was turning into a nightmare for you, this will most likely ease up your work.

vCenter Log Insight comes from the acquisition by VMware last year of a company called Pattern Insight. VMware was interested in the core functionality of one of their products and integrated it into their own product line.

vCenter Log Insight is currently available as a Beta version, and is provided in the form of a 572 MB virtual appliance (you will need a My VMware account to download the beta, links are at the end of the article). Availability is planned for Q3 2013 and product should be sold either standalone or in conjunction with vCenter Operations Manager.

I’ve installed the virtual appliance in our lab and found it to be very comfortable to use, I especially enjoy the following features:

• quick and easy setup
• very clean and user-friendly UI
• the various dashboards and the ability to customize them
• the ability to search keywords across logs, which is much easier than using notepad

Here are a few screenshots:

vCenter Log Insight virtual appliance booting

Once the appliance boots, you get a VERY sexy console screen, I’m all happy inside just at the thought of it:

Console View

After a couple minutes, some data begins to be collected and analyzed. Here’s a sample of the interactive analytics view:

Analytics View

This products promises to be a very powerful aid to admins, our logs are clean for now since we reinstalled the lab a couple days ago and made some cleanup, and we expect to see more activity as users start creating VMs again

If you want to learn more about vCenter Log Insight (I know you will!):

• Read this comprehensive article by John Herlocker
• Download the beta version of VMware vCenter Log Insight here
• Install the virtual appliance
• Enjoy, and share the VMware love

A great initiative from Duncan Epping and Frank Denneman, their two excellent books: VMware vSphere 4.1 HA/DRS and 5.0 Clustering Deepdive Kindle version are available for free!

I have bought those two books in the past and they are an invaluable resource for any serious professional who is into virtualization.

Go get them while they’re free, and drop a thank you note to Duncan and Frank!

http://t.co/cMNREZNzvH & http://t.co/ZL6HteCJwK

In the course of our work, we are all faced at a point with the necessity to implement "solutions" that are against nature and common sense. I invite you to take a journey on a fairy tale where a critical process requires Microsoft Office 2010 on a server to run. Using an enterprise, preconfigured MS Office 2010 package will install properly but may fail to activate. After investigating, I found out that Office wasn't able to find to resolve the address of the KMS License Server.

Here's how I resolved the issue:

1. Add the Key Management Service server key to the server's Registry

you can look this up on any of your workstations where MS Office 2010 is properly configured and activated
- Open Regedit
- Navigate to HKLM\Software\Microsoft\OfficeSoftwareProtectionPlatform
- Create a new String Value (REG_SZ) as follows:
        – Name: KeyManagementServiceName
        – Value: fqdn.kmsserver.hostname


2. Activate MS Office 2010 Manually


- Launch cmd.exe
- cd to C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office14
- Launch the following command: cscript ospp.vbs /act


3. Output

(from Command Line Activation)
—Processing—————–———
—————————————
Installed product key detected – attempting to activate the following product:
SKU ID: <—————————>
LICENSE NAME: Office 14, OfficeStandard-KMS_Client edition
LICENSE DESCRIPTION: Office 14, VOLUME_KMSCLIENT channel
Last 5 characters of installed product key: xxxxx
<Product activation successful>
—————————————
—————————————
—Exiting——————–———

You can now launch any application qnd check that it is properly validated.

4. Make coffee or tea and enjoy!

Max

Like many people I follow with interest, amusement and sometimes consternation the war that is waged by proxy between the two main virtualization contenders: VMware and Microsoft.

VMware, the market leader, weighs in with the incontestable arguments of proven, real world experience as well as a solid set of features. Microsoft, the challenger, arguments to this with cheaper licensing, reduced operational costs, integrated management with SCVMM and features to be introduced in their next hypervisor.

What is appalling is that some supporters are very vocal, rather too much in fact, more like people at a marketplace screaming loudly to sell their fish & vegetables. What these people didn’t get is that as a customer, I’m not going to buy their fish or hypervisor based on who screamed the most, but based on the intrinsic qualities of the software. I usually have a list of requirements, my buyer’s checklist if you will, and I will compare products based on how they suit my needs, on their reliability, their reputation then their price.

A rant against Microsoft here. All the pro Hyper-V blogs always argument that “we’re cheaper!” and “we’ll include awesome features in the next version”. Great, but I need something which offers the features now, which is reliable, proven. When I design an infrastructure or a project I can’t tell a client that the feature will be available in the next release (I’m not a commercial, mind you). Price isn’t everything… when you can afford it. An enterprise class customer with a very demanding may opt to go for the hypervisor who offers enterprise class features, and no matter which side you support, real-world experience and feedback incontestably says that VMware is THE enterprise-class hypervisor.

However a customer won’t accept to pay blindly for a product, no matter how good and unique it is, and how rich they are. When Hyper-V will become good and mature enough so that a large amount of features offered by vSphere are included/supported in it at a decent (and presumably lower) price, VMware may be forced to review their pricing policy. A lot of people still have the vTax affair in mind. By the way, Microsoft and their PR machine put a lot of effort in making a big fuss about the vRAM entitlements, but did it made Hyper-V work better? And who says Microsoft will keep binding licenses to CPU sockets in the future. You get the point.

On the other hand I can fully understand that an SMB with Microsoft Gold Partner status will naturally be inclined to adopt Hyper-V as their standard hypervisor.

The IT transformation journey is a path paved with good intentions but ambushed by merciless propaganda. It’s not different from everyday life and good judgement should be applied the same way as you would do when choosing a new house or new car. You’re investing money so ensure it fits your needs and it’s not done to impress the neighbors.

Don’t get distracted by claims, check products that match with your needs and do the math yourself.

When I decided to pass my VCP5, I thought the hardest would be learning and preparing for the exam. On the fateful day of the exam, I thought the hardest would be to focus and don’t be distracted by feelings of fear and discouragement. I didn’t knew yet that the most challenging skill would be patience. In today’s ubiquitous world, we’re more and more plunged into semi-immediate communication be it twitter, mail, phone et all. The online shopping experience in this digital era almost makes us forget that there are also people who make certain things possible.

I passed my VCP in February, approximately 2 weeks before the VCP4 upgrade deadline, at a time when all VCP4 holders pushed their final rush to avoid sitting the ICM5 course.

The result was an overwhelming amount of work for the VMware team in charge of certifications: 10x the usual load!

This caused many people to rant and lament, including me. The certification took about 9 weeks to make it here, though I don’t know if homing pigeons were used for this. Nevertheless, now that I have it here, I feel that the journey was more important that the destination. already miss this feeling of waiting for something which required hard work and some sacrifices to attain. The good news is that VMware has released the VCAP5-DCD and is planning to launch the DCA version of their Advanced Professional curriculum. Something definitely worth preparing, hopefully once personal things (the birth of our next baby immediately followed by moving to a house) and professional things (upgrade to vsphere 5, install of veeam backup & replication, consolidation/virtualization of SQL physical servers) all settle down this summer.

Much to look forward to!
Max

Here's a light one to end the week in a good mood! Expect no complex engineering though, PowerCLI scripts to manage snapshots must be very common around!

I manage a small environment where uber-scripting skills are not required. But for the sake of efficiency, laziness and "intellectual effort", here's what I use to patch my machines. All my VMs have custom attributes which include among others Business Owner, Primary IT Administrator, Emergency contact and an obscure one called "IsMirroredToDR". For historical reasons we have a software called HP Storage Mirroring for Virtual Infrastructure (SMVI) which works with ESX 4 (not ESXi), it does a great job but sometimes is a pain when things go wrong. This program creates snapshots and replicates them from production to DR sites at regular intervals for business recovery/continuity purposes.

Now whenever I need to patch servers I of course create snapshots in case something would go wrong. I however need to take special care of the VMs which have the IsMirroredToDR custom attribute set to True. I therefore use the script below to automatically create a snapshot on all VMs that are not mirrored to our DR site, and filter out VMs that are being mirrored so I can take care of those later. Once I have properly stopped all the mirroring processes and ensured all snapshots for these mirrored VMs have been deleted (as in consolidated to the base VMDKs), I then change the "False" to "True", run the script again et voila, even mirrored VMs are snapshotted :-)

I had also tested a version where I also filtered VMs per datacenter, but I somehow didn't save it.

I hope this code snippet will be useful to someone, though it's definitely not rocket science.

Have a nice weekend!

#Get a list of VMs who have the IsMirroredToDR custom attribute set to false, then sort ascending
$VMs = @(Get-VM|Get-Annotation -CustomAttribute "IsMirroredToDR" | Where {$_.Value -eq "False"} | Sort-Object AnnotatedEntity)

#begin action on each filtered VM (comment/uncomment as appropriate)
ForEach ($VM in $VMs) { 

#****CREATE SNAPSHOTS****
#New-Snapshot -VM $VM.AnnotatedEntity -Name BeforePatch

}

Right after passing my VCP5 last week I was contacted by a colleague from Slovakia who asked if I could provide an presentation to VMware vSphere. I liked the idea and asked in our team if someone would like to attend as well. Another colleague who's currently in a desktop support role and plans to upskill also showed interest, thus I started preparing a small workshop for them.

The workshop was time constrained (one day maximum), therefore I decided to articulate its content as follows:

2 hours theory, including among others:

• basic introduction to type 1 & type 2 hypervisors
• company-related stuff (virtualization standards, current infrastructure & design)
• quick ESXi vs Hyper-V feature comparison (+explanation of Transparent Page Sharing, ballooning, vMotion, svMotion)
• Presentation of ESXi and vSphere / vCenter
• VM hardware, Thin/Thick disks
• Review of all vSphere features with comments/quick explanations
• VM Networking

3 hours hands-on lab, including:

• Installation of 2 VMware ESXi hosts
• Basic host setup (setting up NTP, configuring iSCSI software adapter, adding iSCSI targets)
• Storage and VM Networking, Introduction to datastores
• Creating a Windows VM / Installing vCenter Server 5
• Configuring vCenter Server 5
  • Datacenters
  • Clusters
  • Configure a port group for vMotion
  • High Availability
  • Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS)
  • Datastore Clusters & Storage Distributed Resource Scheduler (sDRS)
• Working with the VMware vSphere Client (presentation of the various tabs, performance etc..)
• Creating and working with VMs (snapshots, clones, templates)

In my opinion the theory part was quite dense, grabbing all these concepts in just two hours must not have been easy. The hands-on lab part was packed as well but was probably more enjoyable as colleagues got to interact and experiment. Techies love to get the ability to click everywhere!

The feedback from my colleagues was very positive, I am looking forward to their written comments on the content and the format of this workshop. I hope to have the possibility to provide more trainings like this in the future.

I started my career in IT 13 years ago by teaching people how to use computers so this was a good occasion to rehearse public speaking and appraise my communication skills. It's good to note that experience is like a good wine, the older the better.