- New Best Practices Guide: vSphere 5 High Availability Deployment -
vSphere High Availability greatly simplifes virtual machine provisioning, resource allocation, load balancing and migration while also providing an easy-to-use, cost-efective high-availability and failover solution for applications running in virtual machines. Using VMware vSphere 5.0 and VMware HA helps eliminate single points of failure in the deployment of business-critical applications in virtual machines. It also enables you to maintain other inherent virtualization benefts such as higher system utilization; closer alignment of IT resources with business goals and priorities; and more streamlined, simplifed and automated administration of larger infrastructure installations and systems.
Download VSphere HA 5 Best Practices Guide
- Video - vSphere 5 User Defined Network Resource Pools -
User-defined network resource pools in vSphere 5.0 provide an ability to add new traffic types beyond the standard system traffic types that are used for I/O scheduling. This video shows an example of a user-defined resource pool with shares, limits and IEEE 802.1p tag parameters. When customers are deploying critical applications on virtual infrastructure, they can utilize this advanced feature to reserve I/O resources for the important, business-critical application traffic and provide SLA guarantees. Service providers who are deploying public clouds and serving multiple tenants can now define and provision I/O resources per tenant, based on each tenant’s need.
The new resource pools can be defined at the Distributed Switch level by selecting the resource allocation tab and clicking on new network resource pools. After a new network resource pool is defined with shares and limits parameters, that resource pool can be associated with a port group. This association of a network resource pool with a port group enables customers to allocate I/O resources to a group of virtual machines or workloads.
- Video - Enabling NetFlow on vSphere 5 Distributed Switches -
NetFlow is a general networking tool with multiple uses, including network monitoring and profiling, billing, intrusion detection and prevention, networking forensics, and SOX compliance. NetFlow sends aggregated networking flow data to a third‐party collector (an appliance or server). The collector and analyzer report on various information such as the current top flows consuming the most bandwidth in a particular virtual switch, which IP addresses are behaving irregularly, and the number of bytes a particular virtual machine has sent and received in the past 24 hours. NetFlow is a mature technology, developed by Cisco, that is widely supported by third‐party collectors. NetFlow enables visibility into virtual machine traffic in a virtualized datacenter.
ManageEngine NetFlow Analyzer is a web-based bandwidth monitoring tool that collects NetFlow data exported from routing devices, and uses it to analyze and report on IP traffic across the network. With instant reports on top applications, protocols, conversations, and hosts, NetFlow Analyzer gives you valuable insight into bandwidth usage in your enterprise without the complexity and expense involved in a traditional WAN analysis setup.
- Let The Games Begin - The VMware ESXi Quiz Show -
There is going to be something new and exciting at this year’s VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas. If you want to join the game of the century and watch 3 teams battle for virtualization superiority then sign up for “The VMware ESXi Quiz Show”. Hurry to the schedule builder and sign-up for session VSP1956 Monday from 13:00 to 14:00 before it’s full.
Duncan Epping over at Yellow-Bricks just announced the teams, in the first round The Ranging vBulls will battle the vPredators. The surviving team will take it up against the vRaminators. This is the ultimate final round between the vExperts and the VMware employees. The show is hosted by the one and only John Troyer. Duncan Epping and Eric Sloof will be the judges.
- Video - How to setup a vSphere 5 Port Mirror -
Port mirroring is the capability on a network switch to send a copy of network packets seen on a switch port to a network monitoring device connected to another switch port. Port mirroring is also referred to as Switch Port Analyzer (SPAN) on Cisco switches. In VMware vSphere 5.0, a Distributed Switch provides a similar port mirroring capability to that available on a physical network switch. After a port mirror session is configured with a destination—a virtual machine, a vmknic or an uplink port—the Distributed Switch copies packets to the destination. Port mirroring provides visibility into:
• Intrahost virtual machine traffic (virtual machine–to–virtual machine traffic on the same host)
• Interhost virtual machine traffic (virtual machine–to–virtual machine traffic on different hosts)
The port mirroring capability on a Distributed Switch is a valuable tool that helps network administrators in debugging network issues in a virtual infrastructure. The granular control over monitoring ingress, egress or all traffic of a port helps administrators fine-tune what traffic is sent for analysis.
Port mirror configuration can be done at the Distributed Switch level, where a network administrator can create a port mirror session by identifying the traffic source that needs monitoring and the traffic destination where the traffic will be mirrored. The traffic source can be any port with ingress, egress or all traffic selected. The traffic destination can be any virtual machine, vmknic or uplink port.
- Video - vSphere Storage Appliance - How does it work? -
Watch this video for a overview of the vSphere Storage Appliance and how it works. Learn about "Shared Storage for Everyone"
- Video - What's New in VMware vCloud Director 1.5 -
VMware Director of Enterprise Cloud Product Marketing, discusses what's new in VMware vCloud Director. Learn about building an Enterprise Hybrid Cloud with the VMware vCloud Solution.
- Video - What's New in vSphere 5 and vCenter Heartbeat 6.4 -
A recap of VMware vSphere 5 and vCenter Heartbeat 6.4.
- Video - What's New in VMware vShield 5.0 - Trust Your Cloud -
VMware Product Mgr for Security Products, Ravi Kumar, introduces and discusses VMware vShield 5.0 for security and compliance.
- vSphere 5 Storage DRS Demo -
Storage DRS is an I/O and space load balancing mechanism that determines the best place for a given virtual machine's data to live when it is created and then used over time. For more information click here.
- vSphere 5 Storage Appliance Resilience Demo -
The vSphere Storage Appliance (VSA) Resilience demo will show you how the VSA cluster can survive an appliance failure & an ESXi failure, so that the VMs running on a VSA datastore are not impacted in any way when a node in the cluster fails. For more information click here.
- vSphere 5 Web Client Demo -
The demo will show how easy the new vSphere web client is to access as well as highlight the simplicity of navigating the new interface for common day-to-day tasks of virtualization administrators. For more information click here.