It’s been like what, six months now without blogging?! Now that’s something not cool and I really need to do something about it. The thing is, I’ve been involved in a lot of cool stuff internally at VMware and a lot more projects that I’ve learned so much from. It will all come back and reflect on my future blog posts in a way or another, so I can’t really complain!

But I’m not here to talk about that. I’ve just came across something really cool and I wanted to share with you right away.

Out of the blue, and while I was doing some geeky stuff with WAMP, ColdFusion and the vCloud PHP APIs, I’ve received a ping back from another blog with a title called: “Drawing Network Diagrams like Hany Michael”

What!! Are you kidding me?!! Am I really that famous!!

Ok, jokes aside. The blog post is so insightful that I really liked it a lot. I don’t necessary call then “Rules” as the author described them, but I agree with the vast majority of them. For example, in rule number 3 I personally think that the “right-angle” lines are so ugly in 99% of the cases, but everything has a use case. I just haven’t came across that one yet.

Anyways, I highly recommend reading that article and don’t forget to grab the .VSS stencils file provided by the author. As a matter of fact, I’ve learned a new trick from the “Cloud” shape! I just enhanced it a bit to look like that:

P.S. thank you Jake, you just made my day

Thank you for voting, and for pushing me further to make this blog better! I have so many ideas (and surprises) coming on the way soon.

Stay tuned!

Eric Siebert @ http://vSphere-Land.com has opened the votes once again for the 25 Blogs in 2H10! Eric has a very fair criteria for voting based on: Longevity, Length, Frequency and Quality! I claim to have the second, and the forth, may be the first, but definitely not the third! I’m working on it, and you should read about this in details in my next newsletter.

With that said, I’d be thrilled if i stayed in the top 25! If not, then I will do my best to gain my seat back among this extremely talented and competent bloggers in the next cycle!

To refresh your memory about my past 6 months published contents, I’m listing here the top 5 article views based on WordPress stats plug-in:

• Diagram: ESX Memory Management and Monitoring v1.0
• VMware vSphere on IBM BladeCenter H – (Part 1 & Part2)
• Diagram: VMware vCloud Director Networking Architecture
• The VM Crowd – Episode 1: I’m On Twitter
• Video Guide: Taking VMware vCloud Director for a spin…and on the GO!

• Senior Consultant – Professional Services – Saudi Arabia
• Enterprise Account Manager – Sales – Saudi Arabia
• Engagement Manager – Professional Services – Dubai
• Partner Business Manager – Sales – Dubai
• Senior Systems Engineer – Sales – Dubai

You can click on each link to get more information, and you can also apply from there. If you are looking for technical positions and you think you are good enough, don’t hesitate to contact me directly and I’d be happy to forward your CV along. Please note that I have no influence in the recruitment process, but I can put a good word for you if I felt that you are qualified and passionate about the position.

My email: hany [AT] vmware [DOT] com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/hanymichael

The VM Crowd in the wild

I was really happy with the feedback I received regarding this crazy idea. I didn’t expect that much of attention especially that the first episode is simply a bunch of inside jokes. You literally have to be on twitter day and night to get these jokes and know what on earth I’m talking about. As just an example, the “underwear saga” (as Massimo like to call it) actually happened to me and the latter in London. We were literally stranded in the UK due to this ash cloud, and we did go out together to shop for underwear. I can’t believe I’ve mentioned that twice on my blog! Okay, before I jump to the next point I’d like to thank you for the positive feedback. Stay tuned for more.

Two cool new courses from VMware Education

VMware Education Services lunched two new cool courses:
1 – Transitioning to ESXi: I really like this course, and from what i’ve seen in the course material it has a quite valuable content. I highly recommend this to any one starting fresh on ESXi or planning for the transition. Even if you are quite happy with your classic ESX and its service console, this course will make you change your mind.

2 – vSphere 4.1: Install, Configure and Manage: The course title is self explanatory. We all know about the cool new features of vSphere 4.1 and it’s all in there.

“Virtual Roads. Actual Clouds.”

Yes, VMworld 2010 is approaching and this is the official motto of the event. The sessions and labs catalog are now available online also for your to start exploring the great subjects covered in this event. Some vendors started to talk about their activity in the event, don’t miss the EMC and the IBM ones.

The first end-to-end FCoE solution certified by VMware

This is the industry’s first end-to-end solution by Cisco (datacenter switches) and NetApp (storage) that is certified and supported by VMware. Pretty exciting stuff to the all the FCoE enthusiasts out there. Vaughn Stewart has nice blog post talking about this with a big screenshots from the VMware HCL.

Free Book from NetApp

Still with NetApp and Vaughn, they are giving away free copies from the “vSphere on NetApp Best Practices”. Last word from twitter: the books are flying and only 150 copies are left. You have to have a shipping address in the US to get your copy. Thanks to Aramex.com, i will get my copy

TrainSignal’s vSphere Pro Series Volume 2!

Landed in Doha yesterday after a week of travel to see a very nice surprise in my mail. It’s the TrainSignal second volume of the vSphere Pro Series and It’s featuring some very cool products like SRM, Veeam (Monitor, Reporter and Backup) as well as VDR! I can’t wait to start watching these videos especially the SRM ones!

Cisco UCS Visio Stencils Hidden Secret

I’m working these days on a vSphere design on UCS and of course I had to use Visio in the architecture. I was surprised to see a very few stencils in the official Visio pack from Cisco, and that all of these shapes were just showing the front view of the devices. After “tweeting” out to the community and knowing that it’s not just me who’s frustrated about that, I received the simple answer from Cisco Dubai! you need to right click on the shapes (after placing them in your work area and then you will get the option whether to use the font view or rear one! Doh!

New VMware Releases:

A lot of new releases from VMware in the past few weeks among which: vCenter SRM 4.1, vCenter Orchestrator 4.1, vCenter Server Heartbeat 6.3

It’s an idea that I had for a quite long time, and yet I managed to get it out in the busiest time of my life. Love it or hate it – it’s just for fun, guys!

Apart from being a Sr.Consultant and a TAM at VMware with 100% utilization in this huge and active region, I’ve been also doing lots of reading and studying lately to prepare for the VCAP exams. Not to mention my growing obsession with the Redwood project whether through testing and evaluating it, or following its daily discussions on our developers & PMs mailing lists. Add all that to the frequent traveling and you won’t find a time to scratch your head!

I won’t take much time in this introduction, so straight to the point: I decided to start a newsletter (or whatever they call it these days). I have to admit though that this is not my most original idea. Firstly I was inspired by one of my colleagues in VMware (Michael White – who’s also one of the SRM legends out there). He has an internal weekly newsletter with lots of invaluable information and I really enjoy reading it! I thought of doing the same on my blog, but I wasn’t sure about this idea until I started receiving another mind-blowing weekly newsletter written by our CTO, Steve Herrod. At that point I realized that I’m a newsletter person and I do like the idea of having everything consolidated in one place at a time. I won’t do this letter however on weekly basis, at least at the beginning. Let’s make it casual every two weeks or so until I see my readers feedback.

At least I get to blog, and that’s all what it matters. Here we go.

News flash: vSphere 4.1 is released!

Yes the debate around the numbering (4.1 Vs. 4.5) is finally over. Most of this debate was driven mainly by the fact that it’s a quite powerful release with major enhancements and rich features normally found only in major releases. There is no point of copying and pasting the release notes here if you can read it directly on VMware’s website. Here you go:

• For ESX Classic : http://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere4/doc/vsp_esx41_vc41_rel_notes.html
• For ESXi : http://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere4/doc/vsp_esxi41_vc41_rel_notes.html

The password issue with ESX/i 4.1

You’ve probably heard about the 8-char password issue with ESX/i 4.1, but in case you haven’t heard yet about its solution, you can find the details here in this KB article:
http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1024500

VCB Support in vSphere 4.1

I had a couple of customers asking me about the VCB support and whether it has been removed, and the answer is no. VMware extended the support in 4.1, but I personally recommend moving to the vStorage API for Data Protection (VADP) in case you are upgrading or starting a new vSphere environment.

From our internal mailing list I also quote this: “Several backup vendors have released VADP based backup solutions. These include VMware Data Recovery 1.x, Symantec NetBackup 7.0, Symantec Backup Exec 2010, CA ArcServe 12.5, EMC Avamar 5.0, IBM TSM 6.2, Veeam 4.0 and VizionCore 4.5”

vSphere on IBM BladeCenter H Part II

I’ve been getting many questions about the second part of the BCH, and when I will release it. I actually finished nearly all the Visio diagramming, but the problem is simpler than this. The HX5 and Virtual Fabric expansion card from IBM are not been certified yet by VMware! I was really hoping that both will be on our HCL by the release of vSphere 4.1, but nothing so far. I see no point to publish my article if you won’t be able to use it. Besides, it can cause lots of unnecessary confusions to the partners and customers. I won’t leave you disappointed however, and I’ll direct you to an awesome new redpaper written by IBM on the Virtual Fabric.

http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/redpapers/pdfs/redp4673.pdf

Mobile Noter for iPad!

Every day I find more value for the iPad! I’m not really into games or apps in general, and my main reason for buying an iPad was PDF reading and web surfing while traveling, but I have to admit that it has a lot more value than that. A couple of weeks ago I came to know about this cool App called “Mobile Noter” and it was like a dream came true! I used to take notes and document things on OneNote since it was released back in 2003, and till this moment I still do. The MN simply allows you to synchronize your iPad with either you desktop over a WiFi network, or to the cloud over 3G or WiFi. I can now have all my notes on the go with me either on the iPhone or iPad, and also keep them all synchronized.

New books:

Interesting 2 books talking about the forensic investigations in our virtualization and cloud computing worlds.

• A Digital Forensic Investigator’s Guide to Virtual Environments
  http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1597495573
  
• Digital Forensics for Network, Internet, and Cloud Computing
  http://www.amazon.com/Digital-Forensics-Network-Internet-Computing/dp/1597495379/
  

To the partners

I know there are a quite big number of VMware partners subscribed to my blog (as I see from the email domains), so I’ll try to keep you updated with any important news whenever applicable.

A new version of the HealthAnalayzer appliance has been released with strong support for the vSphere best practices. Make sure to download, test and patch this appliance to the latest updates before going to the customers. Great tool as it has always been!

Why I decided to start this series?

Everyone already knows the revolution the blades had brought to our industry. I’m not going to repeat here what you already know. I’m not going also to promote the blades over the traditional rack servers, or try to answer the eternity question: “scale up or scale out?”. You might have already made you decision to go with blades, or still considering that, in both cases this series should help you to take your next step. My main and only focus here is vSphere. I’ll never try to promote a vendor over another, and I will never try to influence your decision to go with a specific design. Go to the next Q/A to see how can you benefit from this series, or at least how I think you might do.

Who might be interested in this series?

• Consultants or Customers: if you want to have an over whole idea on designing and/or implementing vSphere on specific blade vendors.
• VMware partners: if you are a partner, you may find this series useful to support your presentations to customers. I’ve seen many partners who can talk fluently about their hardware products, however, they can struggle to answer very simple VMware related questions like: how should I map the vSwitches’ uplinks to the blades nics, or how can I have redundancy for my networks, and soon and so forth!
• Knowledge seekers: anyone, like myself, who’s fascinated by VMware and willing to understand how these incredible software technologies can run on different hardware vendors with the same level of flexibility.

What vendors will be covered here, and in which order?

Any blade vendor that is listed in the VMware HCL might be included. I say “might” because it also depends on how fast I’ll be able to learn about this specific vendor technologies given the highly complex and variant architectures from one vendor to another. You should know also that I work on my own here, no help from anyone what so ever. It really takes a lot of blood, sweat and tears to understand each vendor’s approach in doing things.

There is no specific order in this series, I started with IBM because it’s simply the hardware platform that I have worked the most on. If you like the series/concept let me know your thoughts and feedback and based on that I’ll try to prioritize vendors over others. There is no preferences for me personally.

Are you a hardware vendor?

If you work for a blade vendor and stumbled through this series, please take a moment to read the following:

• If you’d like to comment, you are most welcome to add, correct, or amend any details in my posts that are related to your hardware. However, you are not welcome – under any way, shape or form – to bash your competitors in this series.
• I can work with you to highlight anything that can make the vSphere implementation more solid, unique or innovative on your hardware. On the other hand, I will not allow on my blog any vendor to criticize the design and/or implementation options of the other vendors. In short, no FUD please.

Alright then, enough introduction and scary thoughts and let’s get to it. I’ll keep the following list up-to-date to always reflect the new posts of this series.

• vSphere on IBM BladeCenter H

Announcement:

Effective March 1st 2010, I am joining the PSO team at VMware as the first Senior Consultant covering the Middle-east region.

Now that the word is out, I guess everyone reading these lines will say something like: “Here we go again, another blogger joining another vendor. The trend continues.”

Well, you might be right at some level. I am a blogger. VMware is a vendor. What else would be different?

What is different here, at least in my opinion, is the timeline and circumstances that this whole story developed through. My original plan was to write a pretty huge post and tell you everything about it. How the dream started when I was watching the VMworld 2008 opening keynote. How the opportunity represented itself from the least expected way. How I went through the longest, most challenging and exciting interview process I have ever experienced throughout my career.

I said “my original plan” because I had to come up with an alternative. Unfortunately I’m just being hyper-sensitive now towards anything that I want to say or disclose about VMware. You know this feeling when you start in a new place, where you don’t know initially what you can and can’t talk about in public? Hopefully it will be a short period before I start getting the essence of the VMware internal culture and be more comfortable to share with you my experience in this great place. Until then, all what I can tell you is that I was approached by Duncan Epping back in July 2009 for an opportunity in the PSO team.

Yes, it was July 2009, before there was even a trend in the first place. This huge gap between now and then wasn’t really up to me or to VMware. It’s the complicated system of sponsorship that we have in this part of the world and all its related formalities. I was crazy patient, and they were very determined to have me. But I’m not here to bore you about these details. What I want to do instead is to acknowledge the huge efforts by Duncan throughout the process. I would have loved to talk in details about that, but again, I find myself in the same situation where I don’t know if I can elaborate more or not. Regardless of all that, let me take a quick moment here to tell you about this true legend, and why I pride myself on being referred to VMware by him.

I don’t look at Duncan as the number one blogger in the community (three times in a row and counting), or as someone who has an unmatchable visibility and influence (check his IOPS post for example), or even as someone who has a great deal of respect and admiration from everyone I’ve known in (and outside) the community. It’s something completely different than all that. It is simply his “passion” for the technology that really differentiate him from the crowd. This is the one thing that always stands out to me about Duncan.

I know brilliant people, I mean literally “brilliant” people in our community with an incredible experience and knowledge that I might never even achieve any time in my future career. But I have never (I repeat: never) saw someone among those people whom I thought for one second to have more passion than me for the virtualization technology in general or VMware in particular. Duncan was (and still) the only exception to that. Every little blog post, email or even tweet I see from him, I always see someone who has passion and dedication for what he does more than anyone I have ever known.

That is why I will always look up to him for inspiration, and that is why he will always be my number one in VMware.

Now that I’m approaching the end of my post, I’d like to take this chance to thank Deepak Narain for his continued support and for sticking up for me. I wouldn’t have reached this place without all your help, even for the very little logistic things that you were voluntarily taking care of to get me on board as soon as possible. I’d like also to thank Vegard Sagbakken, Frank Denneman and Aaron White. They were among the people in VMware who knew about my delayed recruitment process, and were very kind to follow up with me on its progress.

Lastly, and most importantly, to my dear blog readers: it was through your encouragement and positive feedback that I was able to keep this blog running, and it was through this blog that I got the visibility and exposure for VMware to hire me. With that said, I will always do my very best to keep my content here as unique, informative and educational as possible. Everything you’ve seen and liked on this blog up till this moment was completely gathered on my own, I didn’t even have a partner access or any source of information other than what was available to the public. Imagine the giant leap that I’m taking now where I get to read, learn, try and witness everything directly from the source. I am so excited to start this new journey, and I promise you that I’ll always deliver higher quality posts to you.

Oh, and in case you didn’t get the joke in the subject, the VMware employees are not entitled to the vExpert award!

P.S. This was a last minute thing, and it’s just for fun: (click here)

I’m a big believer in everything visual as you know, and I think that this kind of video based training is the way to go for anyone learning about something new for the first time. The next step, of course, would be reading full-blown books and product manuals, but again: it is way too easy to start your knowledge journey with this kind of CBTs to get you up to speed with the main concepts and most importantly to see the whole thing in front of you without worrying about setting the labs and related prerequisites.

With that said, I was really excited to know about this new releases coming soon from Trainsignal, and even more excited when I knew about the great instructors of the series: David Davis, Hal Rottenberg and Rick Scherer!

Without further ramblings, here are the main highlights of the videos included, and you can read the full details on the official site here:

VMware View & ThinApp – David Davis

• Video 1 Virtual Desktop Infrastructure Overview – Understanding the Options
• Video 2 Introduction to VMware View
• Video 3 Installing VMware View 4
• Video 4 Deploying Virtual Desktops with View
• Video 5 Automated Virtual Desktop Deployment with View Pools
• Video 6 Adding a Terminal Services Pool in View
• Video 7 Understanding View Composer Linked Clones
• Video 8 Introduction to ThinApp 4
• Video 9 Installing ThinApp
• Video 10 Virtualizing Applications with ThinApp

Managing VMware vSphere with PowerCLI – Hal Rottenberg

• Video 1 Introduction to Power CLI
• Video 2 PowerShell Basics
• Video 3-1 PowerCLI Concepts – Part 1
• Video 3-2 PowerCLI Concepts – Part 2
• Video 4 Power CLI in the Real World
• Video 5 PowerCLI Cmdlet Deep Dives

Cisco Nexus 1000V VMware vSphere Third-Party Virtual Distributed Switch – Rick Scherer

• Video 1 Getting Started with the Nexus 1000V
• Video 2 Integrating the Cisco Nexus 1000V with vCenter Server
• Video 3 High Availability Option for the Cisco Nexus 1000V
• Video 4 Configuring Port Profiles on the Cisco Nexus 1000V

I’m definitely getting a copy of this as soon as it will be released!