During last week’s VMware PEX event the vCloud Client for the iPad was released. I have access to a few VMs hosted in a public vCloud Directory deployment thanks to the guys at Stratogen, which I use from time to time. Up till now, while I can access these VMs on my iPad via RDP with something like the PocketCloud App from Wyse, the web browser interface for the management of these VMs through vCloud Director was not supported through the Safari browser.
VMUG, vBeers, vLunch….whatever the occasion, there are always some great conversations and I particularly enjoy finding out what other people are up to in their environments. During vLunch last week, I was talking with Ed Grigson and he asked whether it was possible to use PowerCLI to remove vCenter Plugins that have got into an orphaned state, i.e. the uninstall process did not remove the vCenter plugin. VMware KB article 1025360 details a process whereby you can clean these up by navigating to the vCenter Server with a web browser.
The vCheck PowerCLI script from Alan Renouf is one of the most popular scripts for managing vSphere with PowerCLI. Its an amazing piece of work and I think has in its own small way helped the success of PowerCLI itself, by showing the kind of information it is possible to retrieve from vSphere and present in a great format. The number of people I talk to who use it and the large scale organisations that you would think spend thousands of pounds on expensive monitoring tools that have it as part of the daily monitoring checks never ceases to surprise me.
Having passed the VCP5 exam last week, I thought I would write the obligatory study resources blog post. So below are the resources I found most useful in preparing for the exam:
1) TrainSignal VMware vSphere 5 Training
I’ve previously used the TrainSignal VMware vSphere 4 VCAP Training Package to begin preparations for the VCAP-DCA exam so was well accustomed with the style of the TrainSignal videos. Since I was in the position of needing to upgrade my VCP from 4 to 5 before February 29th 2012 to avoid needing to fulfill a class requirement again, I found this to be a great resource to quickly get up to speed on some of the new features in vSphere 5 and also provide a refresher for some of the topics that have been in the exam since the VCP 3 days.
I recently needed to provide a high level capacity overview per VMware cluster looking at some metrics of interest that were being used as a guide to the capacity state of a cluster. Note: these are by no means definitive or the ones you should be using in your environment, but for these purposes they met the requirements. The metrics I looked at per cluster were the ratio of vCPUs to pCPUs, the amount of Effective, Allocated and average Active Memory and the amount of Free Diskspace.
The HP Enterprise Virtual Array Family with VMware vSphere 4.0 , 4.1 AND 5.0 Configuration Best Practises Guide, available here, contains many recommendations for ESXi configuration. There are a number of recommended settings in this document to enhance the storage performance, a subset of which I have picked as appropriate for the environment and then needed to configure them on all ESXi hosts.
They can be implemented via PowerCLI and the below script demonstrates how these different types of settings can be configured.
The next London VMUG will take place on 26th January 2012. The agenda is below and as usual there is a fantastic line up of well known members of the community to give you some knowledge from their real world experiences. I’m planning to attend so hope to see you there :-)
A few weeks ago I attended the first ever UK based VMUG at the National Motorcycle Museum in Birmingham. Put together by the same folks who arrange the London VMUG events, it was a great day out and obviously a lot of hard work had been put in by Jane, Alaric, Simon , Stuart and Martyn. I know they had put the best part of 6 months into arranging it, so a lot of effort.
I was lucky enough to receive a review copy of TrainSignal’s VMware vSphere 4 VCAP Training Package and here are my thoughts on the experience. I’m disclosing the fact upfront that it was a review copy and I hope you will trust that my opinons are genuine.
I had previously used TrainSignal’s Exchange 2010 package to quickly get up to speed on a project I was working on at the time which had proven to be a great resource.
As promised, here are my slides from this evening’s UK PowerShell UserGroup - What’s New in PowerCLI 5.0.
What’s New in PowerCLI 5.0
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