As a normal day, got to work at 9 this morning and got cracking on my emails and tasks. Midday arrived and I went for lunch with a colleague who is a VMware enthusiast too. Lunch finished and back to my desk, to go through my personal emails, news and also twitter. Interestingly I got attracted to a tweet from Eric Siebert (@ericsiebert) about the top 25 Blogs around the net.

I remember a week ago replying and entering this by just replying to a survey and I wasn’t that sure that I would be selected and have an entry for a Vote but guess what? I’m there! I’m selected in the top new blogs under 1 year old.

The vote is split into 10 Section:

• Best Storage Blog (Must have more than 50% of posts storage related)
• Best Cloud Blog (Must have more than 50% posts cloud related)
• Best VDI/End-user Computing Blog (Must have more than 50% posts VDI/EUC related)
• Best News & Information Website (No blogs)
• Best Scripting Blogger (Must have more than 50% posts Scripting related)
• Best podcast (Audio or video podcasts)
• Best official VMware Blog (Blogs part of VMware’s website)
• Best Videos used in a Blog (Must have produced a good percentage of videos)
• Best New Blog (Blog must be less than a year old)
• Best Independent Blogger (Can’t work for VMware or a hardware/software vendor).

And the rules are for you to elect 10 of your favourite blog from the list and then rank these in your order of preferences and the result would be: the 1^st Blog will get 10 Points and the last will get 1 Point.

The vote will be open until the 2^nd of February and the result will be determined and announced live at the VMware Partner Exchange.

Note that suspicious votes will be discarded as this time they have implemented a solution for cheats, there will be Geo-location tracking, IP Addresses and cookies to track and protect against any fraudulent votes.

And to finish, Voters will be entered to win a Train Signal copy of vSphere5 and VMware View 5 video training courses.

Now I’m not expecting to be elected as one of the best as I’ve just started blogging but to be faire I’m far than happy to be entering this contest but hay hoo a vote from you will make a difference.

Get now guys and cast your votes and why not mine!!

During my Lab upgrade which went quiet smoothly and successfully, I came across this warning “The Number of vSphere HA Heartbeat datastore for host esx01.home.intra in cluster Prod in home is 0, which is less than required: 2” in the Tasks and events.

This must be a new feature “vSphere HA Heartbeat” of VSphere 5.0.

Let’s digin.

Prior this version, if we have a Host which is isolated from the cluster on its network management, HA will kick in and restart the VMs running on this host on a different ESX host and now with vSphere 5.0, a new feature has been added to the HA, vCenter will check the heartbeat on the Management network and also on the Vmkernal side. This Datastore Heartbeat feature should give a more accurate and determine if the given host has failed or this has just had a glitch somewhere.

Now once I’ve presented my storage to these two ESXi hosts, this warning disappeared and both ESXi have chosen the presented LUNs for storage heartbeating. How cool is this?

Understand how auto deploy works with this Video from a VMware Tech Pubs, Daniel Hiltgen a senior staff working for vMware. this is realy a very good piece of solution that worth a try.

Auto Deploy Architecture – YouTube.

This is a while since VMware released the vSphere version 5 and the time has come to move on to the next level. Multiple new features have been shipped with this new version and one of the cool features that I’ve read about is the storage appliance VMware VSA which can be used if you do not have any external NAS/SAN solution in your network. VMware vSphere Storage Appliance when installed can be setup as storage cluster between two, three hosts and share the datastore this between ESXi hosts (this is an excellent solution for a small business or someone who want to test VMware capacities before investing). With this you can play around with it, vMotion your virtual machines, share the datastore for all these hosts, replicate between ESXi hosts and have it as one solution for availability, failover capability between your hosts.

Anyway, my point in this article is to talk about my plan in upgrading my Home lab and also my Certification . Lot of reading gone on in the last few weeks/months preparing myself and I think time has now come to start by upgrading my Home lab. This is now sitting on the vCenter and ESXi version 4 and looking forward to do an upgrade rather than a migration.

My current setup consists of:

Physical:

-          2 x ESXi hosted on 2 x identic Xeon XW6400 with 8gig Ram, 500gig local storage each that I’ve had from my former employee (RIP Symbian).

-          1 x external NFS, iSCSI storage (QNAP SS-439 Turbo NAS) with 800gig Storage.

-          1 x NetGear Prosafe 8-Port Gigabit Ethernet Switch.

-          1 x NetGear Router for DHCP.

-          1 x HP NC6400 Laptop with Veeam Backup and replication V.5 installed on it (Thanks to Veeam).

Virtual:

My Virtual infrastructure sit on a Windows 2008 and R2 versions (AD/DNS, MS SQL, Citrix XenApp, vCenter).

Lots of reading and planning gone and though of and now it’s my turn to give back to the community what I’m planning to achieve.

My first step is going to be the migration of the vCenter to Version 5 before moving my ESXi hosts to the same version. Some few requirements that will to be taken into consideration are:

Pre-Upgrade Tasks:

• The Software and Hardware requirement:  vCenter 5.0 Server requires a 64-Bit Software and Hardware.
• Database requirement:

1-      Do backup your Database or take a snapshot of this one from your ESX/ESXi host before moving on.
2-      Might be the time to upgrade your vCenter Database if you are still on Express 2005 as this is no longer  supported or move to an a Database Server that is now supported (vSphere 5.0 Upgrade Guide, pg  29.)
3-      Be sure that you have/Created a 64Bit DSN prior the migration and the DSN is using the SQL Native Client driver.

• Make the most of the vCenter 5.0 upgrade installation file by using the vCenter Host Agent pre-Upgrade Checker as this will report any issue and might prevent a successful upgrade.
• If the VMware Heartbeat or the Microsoft (MSCS) are being used to protect the vCenter, make sure that these are disabled prior the upgrade or you will have your vCenter started somewhere else (Unintentional Failover).

Post-upgrade tasks:

Once the upgrade has been successful and tested all your vCenter to resolve any issues before moving to the next level it is the time to do a Post-upgrade for this migration. The list is not limited to the bellow but these are important as far as I’m concerned.

Some of these Post-Upgrade are:

• Re-install and re-configure the vCenter Plug-ins on your vSphere.
• Again make the most of vCenter and use the 60 days Trial licence until your VMware infrastructure has been upgraded to version 5.0 and then install your vSphere 5.0 Licence key.
• If you are still managing a vi3.x hosts, install the VirtualCenter 2.5 Licence Server.
• If you have been using your VMware Heartbeat or the Microsoft Cluster Server MSCS, this is the time to re-enable these.

You can find several resources on how to migrate a vCenter server to 5.0 and one of which I do recommend is reading this blog from vmguru.nl

In the next couple of days (Starting from tonight), I will go around and play with the upgrade and also stage a migration as well for testing and also posing the result and experience on this blog.

Any comment are more than welcome.

 

What:    London VMUG Meeting (VMware User Group).
When:   26 January 2012 between 10:00 to 17:15.
Where:  London Chamber of Commerce and Industry.
33 Queen Street, London EC4R 1AP

Next Year User group will be Held at the usual Location and not to be missed. One of my new year resolution for next year is to attend this User Group.

Since I’ve put an interest into VMware Virtualization Products, I’ve always wanted to attend one of these and this is because I’ve heard just a good feedback each time one is held. New technologies and solution will be shown to the attendees and also the PowerCLI tips and tricks from Alan Renouf, this time he will show how to deploy a 1000 hosts in a short time using the Auto Deploy Solution.

Also the great Gregg Robertson will present the VCP5 tips and how-to’s in his session (This will be a real treat as I will be taking mine the following month). For some of you who might now know about this VMUG, this is a free event and the meeting will be moved to the nearby Pub “The Pavillion End”.

This is a social event, this will bring the opportunity to meet with some geeks and also build your own network which will help you a lot in your career especially if you are new to the VMware nebula.
By the way you will need to register on the VMUG Website to get a confirmation emailed to you, the places are limited so hurry before it’s late.

You can find the full agenda by going to this link.

I hope to meet some of you guys

Setting up VMware Workstation

From openSuse.org

Full Link : http://en.opensuse.org/Setting_up_VMware_Workstation

Introduction

VMware Workstation is a very popular proprietary virtual machine suite. There are other alternatives such as VirtualBox and QEMU (both open source software) which, unfortunately, are not as a feature rich as a VMware Workstation.

This article explains how to install VMware Workstation 6.5.0 on openSUSE 11.0 and 11.1 beta 5. It may work on older/newer versions.

Installing required packages

Before beginning the installation of VMware Workstation 6.5.0, you have to install the following packages:

• gcc
• make
• kernel-source
• kernel-syms
• linux-kernel-headers (this is probably already installed)

There are different ways of installing packages on openSUSE. For instance, you can use YaST or zypper.

Using YaST

Go to YaST -> Software Management. Search for the packages you need (one at a time) and select them by clicking on the checkbox.

Using zypper

Open the terminal, type the following as the root user:

zypper in gcc make kernel-source kernel-syms linux-kernel-headers

Starting the VMware installer

Once you have installed the aforementioned packages, you can proceed to run the installer. Before doing so, make it executable;

Note: this is an example, replace the version number with the one you have.

chmod +x VMware-Workstation-6.5.0-118166.i386.bundle

Then type (as root):

./VMware-Workstation-6.5.0-118166.i386.bundle

Running VMware Workstation

To run VMware Workstation on openSUSE, you can either click on the VMware Workstation icon or run it from a terminal.

from a Menu entry

There are two ways of doing running VMware Workstation from a menu entry;

• Click on the lizard, type vmware and click on VMware Workstation

OR

• go to lizard -> Applications -> System -> More Programs -> VMware Workstation

from a Terminal

Open a terminal and type

vmware

See Also

• Setting up VMware Server 2 on openSUSE 11.0 [plus enabling USB support]
• If you see segfaults on startup of vmware / kernel modules missing

The cloud express explained by David Davis, the Traing Signal Author of the vMware vSphere Video Training,

” vCloud Express is an Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offering delivered by leading VMware service provider partners. It provides reliable, on-demand, pay-as-you-go infrastructure that ensures compatibility with internal VMware environments and with VMware Virtualized™ services…………..”

Follow this link and you will have some more information about the Cloud Express, really worth watching.

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Wow, finally got my VCP exam after a long time studying and playing with it. passed this last Friday and I got 419 which will allow me to continue if I wanted so. Now priority for sure is to Land a job on VMware and hopefully get more experience with this.

If you are plaing to pass your VCP, lots of videos and learning stuff are available at the VMware.com website and also the Simon long blog is one of the best to test your knowledge.
.

The London VMware Users Group (VMUG) will be held on the 24 November 2009,

Simon Gallagher (vinf.net) and Simon Seagrave (techhead.co.uk) will be presenting a session on putting together and running your own VMware vSphere home or work lab.  This will cover most aspects of the implementation including real world advice, gotchas and a live demonstration using HP Proliant ML115 G5’s and shared storage ( iSCSI OpenFiler)

Surely I will be present this time as I’ve missed the last Users Group Meeting, I hope to meet new people and discuss more about VMware and the Virtualisation in general.

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