When VMware released version 5.1 of their cloud infrastructure suite namely vCloud Suite, end of August 2012, vCenter 5.1 integrated an advanced Single Sign-On mechanism to easily login to most components of the suite, let’s review the technical background involved. Justin King is part of VMware technical marketing team, he presented the latest innovations with a particular focus on SSO. Summary of vCenter 5.1 Features Fully functional Web Client feature complete all of the new technologies are only available in the web client there is a slight learning curve (~1-2h) Object Tagging previously it was custom attributes wihch still exist Tagging is simular with much more flexibility, we can place it on anything on the inventory: VM, Datastores, Networks, Hosts Single Sign-On Authentication services Performance Improvements not only from the client perspective but also at the database level HA for all vCenter Services SSO, Inventory Service, Web Client, flexibility to scale-out or scale-up them vSphere Web Client Primary client for vSphere 5.1 environment, supported for IE, Firefox and Chrome on Windows and Mac, it’s a Abobe Flash based solution (11.1+). 300 concurrent sessions on the Web client eats around 25% of vCenter CPU while 100 session of the previous vSphere client eats around 50% of CPU resources. Database partinionned now, Clients Reads are offloaded to the Inventory Services, writes still done directly on vCenter. ...

Julien Niedergang, is a pre-sales SUSE engineer, curious about OpenStack, he presented SUSE strategy and solutions based on Crowbar, Chef and OpenStack. Look into the past 1960-1980 Time sharing Atomic bomb, end of lamps in computing. Bull in 1956 patents time sharing. Mainframes, computing is more and more necessary to achieve big projects. IBM 370 were essential for Apollo project. In 1980, big companies purchase their supercomputer and families get access to computing too. ...

Google regularly invites students and professional to Tech Talk sessions, this time I was invited in their Paris office for a talk about Testing at Google. This is one of the first Tech Talk organized in Paris. Introduction Vincent, our host, is in charge of testing You Tube search and discovery infrastructure. Opened in 2011, more than 80 engineers from then 20 countries are currently working at Google Paris. Around 500 persons works globally in France. The team isn’t dedicated to the french market, but targeted to all countries in the world. I’m glad to hear that. ...

It’s for sure not the first or the last cooking article about Oh My Zsh!, but if you don’t know it, just try it, you’ll understand why so much people are blogging about it. So let’s start by the official description. It’s a community-driven framework initiated by Robby Russel for managing your zsh configuration. It includes 40+ optional plugins (rails, git,OSX, hub, capistrano, brew, ant, macports, etc), over 80 terminal themes to spice up your morning, and an auto-update tool so that makes it easy to keep up with the latest updates from the community. Looks great isn’t it ? So let’s dig it ! ...

vCenter Operations Management Suite is a solution to easily get an high level overview of the Health, Risk and Efficience of a virtual datacenter. This latest release integrates with VMware Infrastructure Navigator which will give you an insight of all the applications deployed within your VMs as well as their inter-dependencies. vCops now also integrates with vCenter Configuration Manager with a fourth supermetric called Compliance. This is a condensed howto about installing and configuring vCops version 5.6, released November 29, 2012. ...

At the last Chef Conf 2012 event, Nathen Harvey in all honesty revealed when he first approched Chef, he stay away from some advanced concepts. He comes back today to help all of us better understand the arcanes of it. By the way he is currently working for CustomInk, as we can consider them sponsors, don’t hesitate to buy their great T-Shirts. Attributes precedences Attributes can be set on the node from the following objects: ...

In this article, we will details all the required steps to build up an environment to host the previous incarnation of this blog on Nginx using Chef on HP Cloud. Twelve years later the world has changed and this blog is now hosted on a bare metal machine in Germany. Chef Repo cloning First of all, if you don’t already have a Chef Repository available on your Chef Workstation, you can clone one easily : ...

Today’s enterprises are adopting methodologies like DevOps and Continuous Delivery to rapidly deliver applications to customers. Continuously building, testing and releasing applications improves the quality of the applications by providing fast user feedback to development teams; rapid release cycles also ensure tighter collaboration between Dev and Ops teams. In this webinar we will learn how the integrated Opscode Chef and Electric Cloud solution automates the end-to-end application delivery process to: ...