VMware released on march 23rd NSX-v 6.1.3 which now support vSphere 6.0. I was waiting for this release to upgrade my Bulb lab to the latest and greatest, so here am I. In this article, I’ll describe the upgrade process. I’ll start by upgrading NSX to 6.1.3 and continue on by upgrading vCenter Appliance to 6.0. I’m eager to get the latest improvement that both vSphere 6.0 and NSX 6.1.3 offers. ...
For years a big gap existed between embedded OS for smartphone and server operating system. Mark Shuttleworth and his team have been working for quite some time on optimizing their Ubuntu operating system for the smartphone world. Beginning of december, they’ve announced a new transactionnally updated version of Ubuntu optimized for the cloud, the result of their years of working for the embedded world. Snappy is a minimal server image where applications can be upgraded and rolled back atomically. It’s not the only similar initiative, it started with CoreOS, a reachitected Linux OS to run modern infrastructure stacks, but RedHat is also trying to keep up with project Atomic. Snappy can be used to run Docker containers but not only, it’s one of the main differentiator of Canonical solution. ...
Redhat announced a month ago OpenStack Platform 5.0 which officially support VMware NSX 6.0 and vSphere 5.5. In our lab today, we’ll deploy this OpenStack distribution and connect it to NSX and vSphere to see how easy it is and if everything works as expected. By the way it’s not, so beware, this article is just a preview of what’s coming. If you want to reproduce the same setup, you’ll have to wait until VMware officially support RedHat 7.0. This article will be updated accordingly when it will be publicly available. ...
In this article we will review all the steps required to deploy NSX 4.0 a Network Virtualisation offering from VMware. We will nest this lab within an OpenStack cloud but you can run the lab anywhere else where you can launch VMs, including vSphere, Virtual Box or VMware Fusion. OpenStack Networking In our environment each kvm VM will be connected to distinct networks using different virtual interfaces. We first have to create four logical networks within our OpenStack cloud. It’s a funny exercice to deploy NSX nested inside NSX ! ...
VMware Infrastructure Navigator is a component of vCenter Operations Suite, it’s an application awareness plug-in to the vCenter Server that provides continuous dependency mapping of applications. Infrastructure Navigator offers application context to the virtual infrastructure administrators to monitor and manage the virtual infrastructure inventory objects and actions. Administrators can use Infrastructure Navigator to understand the impact of the change on the virtual environment in their application infrastructure. This article is a condensed howto about installing and configuring VIN version 5.6, released November 29, 2012. ...
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. ...
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. ...