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The vSphere Web Client, the Next-generation browser-based vSphere Client. A browser-based, fully-extensible, platform-independent implementation of the vSphere Client based on Adobe Flex. The vSphere 5.0 release includes both the new browser-based client and the Windows-based client available in prior releases. In this release, the browser-based client includes a subset of the functionality available in the Windows-based client, primarily related to inventory display and virtual machine deployment and configuration. In this video I’ll show you how to log in to vCenter Server using the vSphere Web Client and manage your vSphere inventory. Before you can start to use the Web Client you first have to verify that the vCenter Server system is registered with the client. Just open a Web browser and enter the URL for the vSphere Web Client: http://server_name:8443/vsphere-client The vSphere Web Client has improved immense comparing to the old Web Access interface and is completely rewritten in Adobe’s Flex. It’s supported on the following browsers: - Microsoft Internet Explorer 7 and 8 - Mozilla Firefox 3.5 and 3.6 To deploy virtual machines in the vCenter Server inventory, you can create a virtual machine or clone an existing virtual machine. It’s also possible to deploy a Virtual Machine from a Template with the vSphere Web Client. Deploying a virtual machine from a template creates a virtual machine that is a copy of the template. The new virtual machine has the virtual hardware, installed software, and other properties that are configured for the template. USB devices attached to the client computer running the vSphere Web Client or the vSphere Client can be connected to a virtual machine and accessed within it.

This video will show you how to install ESXi 5.0 on a drive with an existing ESX 4.1 installation and VMFS datastore present. ESXi 5.0 uses the same installer for fresh installations and upgrades. If the installer finds an existing ESX 4.x or ESXi 4.x installation, it allows you to performs an upgrade. During this upgrade, the ESXi installer will offer several options for preserving or discarding existing ESX host settings and VMFS datastores. If an earlier version of ESX and VMFS was found by the installer, it will show you the selected storage device contains an installation of ESX and a VMFS datastore. You can choose whether to upgrade or install and overwrite the existing installation. You can also choose whether to preserve or overwrite the existing VMFS datastore. After upgrading from ESX 4.1 to ESXi 5.0, only the relevant settings will be migrated.

UEFI virtual BIOS. Virtual machines running on ESXi 5.0 can boot from and use the Unified Extended Firmware Interface (UEFI). When you create a new virtual machine on an ESXi 5.0 host you have the option to choose for virtual machine version 8. This new version brings a lot of extra (scalability) features but there’s one other interesting new feature. The Extensible Firmware Interface can be selected to replace the BIOS of a virtual machine. EFI is the successor of the traditional BIOS which is used since the introduction of the IBM PC back in 1981. If you want to host Apple Mac OS X 10.6 in a virtual machine, you need EFI. In this video I’ll show you how to get access to the EFI interface. I’ll also show you how you can get access to the pre-OS command line environment. When you select a guest operating system, BIOS or Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) is selected by default, depending on which firmware the operating system uses. Mac OS X Server guest operating systems support only EFI. If the operating system supports both BIOS and EFI, you can change the default before you install the guest operating system. Use the Virtual Machine Properties dialog box at the end of the creation process or after the virtual machine is created. The Firmware selection pane is on the Options tab under Advanced > Boot Options. vSphere 5.0 also supports booting ESXi hosts from the Unified Extensible Firmware Interface (UEFI). With UEFI you can boot systems from hard drives, CD-ROM drives, or USB media. Booting over the network requires the legacy BIOS firmware and is not available with UEFI.

So what’s the fuzz about this new vSphere 5 Storage DRS feature? This feature delivers the DRS benefits of resource aggregation, automated initial placement, and bottleneck avoidance to storage. You can group and manage similar datastores as a single load-balanced storage resource called a datastore cluster. Storage DRS makes VMDK placement and migration recommendations to avoid I/O and space utilization bottlenecks on the datastores in the cluster. Storage DRS takes care of the initial placement of virtual machines and VMDK files. This placement is based on Space and I/O capacity. Storage DRS will select the best datastore to place this virtual machine or virtual disk in the selected Datastore Cluster. When Storage DRS is set to fully automatic, it will do automated load balancing actions. Of course this can be configured as manual as well and that is actually the default today. Load balancing again is based on space and I/O capacity. If and when required Storage DRS will make recommendations based space and I/O capacity. It will however only do this when a specific threshold is reached. I’ve recorded a video which will show you how to: - Configure a Datastore Cluster - Set Storage DRS Automation Level - Set Storage DRS Runtime Rules - Create a Storage DRS Scheduled Task - Using Storage DRS Rules - Edit Virtual Machine Settings for a Datastore Cluster - Apply Storage DRS Recommendations - Add Storage to a Datastore Cluster A datastore cluster is a collection of datastores aggregated into a single unit of consumption for an administrators. When a datastore cluster is created, Storage DRS can manage the storage resources comparable to how DRS manages compute resources in a cluster. As with a cluster of hosts, a datastore clusters is used to aggregate storage resources, enabling smart and rapid placement of new virtual machines and virtual disk drives and load balancing of existing workloads. When you create a VM you will be able to select a Datastore Cluster as opposed to individual datastores. Storage DRS provides initial placement recommendations to datastores in a Storage DRS-enabled datastore cluster based on I/O and space capacity. During the provisioning of a virtual machine, a datastore cluster can be selected as the target destination for this virtual machine or virtual machine disk after which a recommendation for initial placement is done based on I/O and space capacity. Initial Placement in a manual provisioning process has proven to be very complex in most environments and as such important provisioning factors like current I/O load or space utilization are often ignored. Storage DRS ensures initial placement recommendations are made in accordance with space constraints and with respect to the goals of space and I/O load balancing. Although people are really excited about automated load balancing, it is Initial Placement where most people will start off with and where most people will benefit from the most as it will reduce operational overhead associated with the provisioning of virtual machines. Ongoing balancing recommendations are made when one or more datastores in a datastore cluster exceeds the user-configurable space utilization or I/O latency thresholds. These thresholds are typically defined during the configuration of the datastore cluster. Storage DRS utilizes vCenter Server’s datastore utilization reporting mechanism to make recommendations whenever the configured utilized space threshold is exceeded. I/O load is evaluated by default every 8 hours currently with a default latency threshold of 15ms. Only when this I/O latency threshold is exceeded Storage DRS will calculate all possible moves to balance the load accordingly while considering the cost and the benefit of the migration. If the benefit doesn’t last for at least 24 hours, Storage DRS will not make the recommendation.

I've recorded a video which will show you the new vSphere 5 iSCSI UI support and some other usability improvements. In vSphere 5 you'll have the ability to configure dependent hardware iSCSI and software iSCSI adapters along with the network configurations and port binding in a single dialog box using the vSphere Client. Full SDK access is also available for these configurations. If you use the software or dependent hardware iSCSI adapters, you must configure connections for the traffic between the iSCSI component and the physical network adapters. Configuring the network connection involves creating a virtual VMkernel interface for each physical network adapter and associating the interface with an appropriate iSCSI adapter. If your host has more than one physical network adapter for software and dependent hardware iSCSI, use the adapters for multipathing. You can connect the software iSCSI adapter with any physical NICs available on your host. The dependent iSCSI adapters can be connected only with their own physical NICs.

ESXi includes a firewall between the management interface and the network. To ensure the integrity of the host, VMware has reduced the number of firewall ports that are open by default. The ESXi firewall is enabled by default. At installation time, the firewall is configured to block incoming and outgoing traffic, except traffic for the default services. The firewall also allows Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) pings and communication with DHCP and DNS (UDP only) clients. From the host Security Profile panel, you can configure firewall properties for this host. The Secuirty Profile panel lists the incoming and outgoing connections for the firewall and the port each service uses. The panel also displays the IP addresses that are allowed to connect for each service. You can modify the list of services and the allowed IP addresses for each service. You can add supported services and management agents that are required to operate the host by adding ruleset files to the ESXi firewall configuration file directory /etc/vmware/firewall/. You open or close ports for these services by enabling or disabling the service on the host's security profile in the vSphere Client.

We all know Carter from the days he brought PowerCLI to the market. After the successful launch of this new automation product, Carter moved over to Spring, where he’s working as a product manager of one of the most secret Spring projects. For these secret projects he was looking for a tool or appliance which could be sued to introduce low network bandwidth, latency and packet loss in order to test his cool WebApps. After some searching and tweeting around he has decided to build an appliance on his own. WANatronic uses Ubuntu 8.04 JEOS, RC tools and IP tables. I’ve recorded a short video about what you can do with it and how it works. If you’re interested in giving it a try and you’re using vSphere, I’ve created a VMware vSphere WANatronic 10001 appliance OVF file which can be downloaded from this location.

I’m very busy with preparing my upcoming "Mythbusters Goes Virtual" VMworld session which will go deep into a few specific well known vSphere myths. The myth busting will be done by Mattias Sundling and me. I’ll have the honour to debunk the fact that RDM offers a better performance compared to VMFS. My lab wasn’t equipped with a device that offers RDM storage and VMFS storage but luckily my good friend Duco Jaspars brought my into contact with Iomega’s Benelux country manager Filip Joly.

Deploying a new VM in the vCloud is very easy. Just go to your Catalog, select one of your vApps Templates and choose “Add to My Cloud”. But what if you want to move an existing virtual machine from your local vCenter server of private vCloud to BleuLock’s vCloud Datacenter? It’s also very easy. Launch the vCloud Connector from your vSphere client and move your existing virtual machines wherever you want. The VMware vCloud Connector is a free plug-in that will allow VMware vSphere administrators to immediately begin deploying and managing virtual machines across VMware vCloud Powered cloud services from within the VMware vSphere Client. In this video I’ll show you how to configure both the vCenter server and the vCloud Director address and how to upload a virtual machine to BlueLock’s vCloud.

Arista vEOS is a virtual-machine-based or switch-integrated implementation of Arista EOS that integrates with VMware vSphere to provide the network operator visibility and configuration access to the virtual switches within the virtual server environment.In this video I'll show you how to deploy the vEOS virtual appliance.

VMware Labs present its latest fling, the Ruby vSphere Console - RVC is an open source project. Ruby vSphere Console (RVC) is a console UI for vSphere, built on the RbVmomi bindings to the vSphere API. RVC is a console UI for VMware ESX and vCenter. The vSphere object graph is presented as a virtual filesystem, allowing you to navigate and run commands against managed entities using familiar shell syntax. Features: • Tab Completion • Marks • Ruby Mode • VMODL Introspection • Multiple Connections • Extensibility This video will show you how to get up-and-running. You'll learn how to install the Ruby vSphere Console and how to connect to the vCenter Server. I'll also show some basic tasks like powering off and -on virtual machines.

Video - Getting Started With VMware Cloud Foundry - Getting Started with Cloud Foundry provides information about installing and starting VMware Cloud Foundry, the VMware Application Platform as a Service (PaaS) solution. This video is intended for anyone who wants to install, configure, and use VMware Cloud Foundry.

Using Private VLANs doesn’t consolidate the number of VLANs used or does it? If you want to add security between virtual machines on the same subnet without exhausting VLAN number space, VMware advises to use Private VLANs. Private VLANs are an excellent way to provide layer 2 network isolation between servers in the same subnet. In this video you will learn that using Community Private VLANS doesn’t consolidate the number of VLANs used. On the other hand, when using Isolated Private VLANs you won’t exhaust the number of available VLAN IDs.

While I was prepping for my upcoming VCP-DT (beta) exam, I couldn’t resist recording a new video and here it is. The VMware View Composer, a key component of VMware vSphere 4.6, is tightly integrated with VMware View Manager to provide advanced image management and storage optimization. VMware View Composer reduces storage requirements for virtual desktop machines by up to 90 percent and enables organizations to more effectively manage their desktop images.

The world of monitoring tools is changing fast - after last week’s release of VMware Operations - it’s now VKernel’s new Performance Analyzer who makes its debut. monitors, diagnoses, and resolves performance issues in virtual environments. Performance Analyzer compliments monitoring and alarming capability in vCenter, it can not only diagnose problems but also resolve them. I’ve created a short demo video of the Performance Analyzer which is bundled in the VKernel vOperations Suite or vOPS 3.0.