So, I have been looking forward to this trip for a LONG time. Having been to a couple of VMworld Europe events I decided it was time to cross the pond and check out the US version. Decided to fly out a few days early and check out some San Francisco sites, which has been great. Today was the first official day of the conference with registration open and the labs advertised as available for most of the day.
Fellow London VMUG regulars and vExperts Barry Coombs and Mike Laverick have recently self published a new title Building EUC Solutions with VMware View. This book covers the most recent release of View 5.1 and having been privileged to help review one of the chapters and already get myself 1/4 the way through the book it is looking to be a phenomenal effort.
The authors have a lot of real world experience and translate this into the book.
The agenda for the next London VMUG on 19th July 2012 has been posted, looks like another great event - in particular I reckon you should get there for the NDA session.
Centrix Software Presentation Fusion-IO Presentation Whiptail Presentation EMC Labs Throughout the Day Lee Dilworth - VMware Availability Update: vSphere Replication, Stretched Clusters and BCDR Darren Woollard and Gregg Robertson - vSphere Nerdknobs Chris Evans - The Storage Architect’s View Chris Gale - Fusion-IO More Desktops.
The public vote for sessions at VMworld opened today and there are a crazy number of great sessions to choose to vote for. I decided to give it a go myself this year, so have teamed up with my good buddy Hal Rottenberg to put forward the session 2112 Transforming Your Automation Scripts with Advanced PowerShell / PowerCLI. If you would like to see us present it, then please consider voting it up!
The next London VMUG takes place this Thursday May 17th and there’s still time to register. The line-up looks great as usual and in particular some excellent community content is on the agenda from well known regular faces at the VMUG.
Hope to see you there.
London VMUG Meeting
In an Active Directory environment its typical for client machines to use a local domain controller as their time source, domain controllers with the PDC emulator for the domain and the PDC emulator for the root domain to synchronise time with an external source. In most circumstances the aim is to keep the time synchronised within a 5 minute tolerance level, this will ensure there are no issues with Kerberos authentication which has the 5 minute tolerance as part of its requirements.
I experienced a vSphere HA event where VMs restarted on other hosts and I was requested by management to confirm which VMs had restarted. Details are stored within vCenter events, but trawling through those manually for multiple VMs would be pretty tedious. Enter of course, PowerCLI. The Get-VIEvent cmdlet enables you to search through the events, but to a certain extent it kind of helps if you know what you are looking for since there is so much information to look through.
Here’s a quick post on installing VMware Tools inside Windows Server 8 Core Beta (Note the Tools version this was tested against is the version that is available via ESXi 5 Build 515841):
Mount the VMware Tools installer for the VM and switch to the CD-Rom drive. (Note: the screenshots below show a session where I was already running PowerShell, not cmd.exe) Run setup. Work through the wizard, selecting the appropriate options: Alternatively, you could use some of the command line options for installing VMware Tools, e.
If you’re running your vSphere deployment on HP kit then there’s a pretty good chance you use the HP Customized ISO Image for installation, for example this one for ESXi 4.1 U1. These customised images typically contain HP management tools and drivers and are great for saving time during the installation process. Naturally you will be upgrading ESXi at some point, but it’s important that you also keep the HP part up-to-date too.
I remember back to a London VMUG long ago a presentation about differences to watch out for between ESX and ESXi during the version 3.5 days. The one that got most people looking around at each other saying “oops, I don’t think we knew that” was configuring a Syslog server for your ESXi servers. vCenter 5 now includes it’s own built in Syslog server so there’s no excuse. Alternatives, such as Kiwi Syslog Server, are available if you don’t want to use the vCenter 5 syslog server.