Archive for the ‘Tutorials’ Category

And finally some real action of the new amazing vSphere's Fault Tolerance. In this video we'll do the following in order:

• Verify that the FT logging is enabled on our network card.
• Enable the FT on one VM.
• Observe that the VM has two instances, the primary running on one ESX server, and the secondary running on a deferent ESX server.
• Demonstrate the "Record & Play", or to be acurate the "vLockStep" mechanism used on the FT enabled VM.
• Start a large file copy to the VM as a continuous operation in place throughout our fail-over process
• Start the fail-over process by resetting the ESX blade via the Dell admin console.
• Observe that the VM has been shifted to the secondary ESX server, and that the file copy is not interrupted.
• Observe that the FT has automatically chosen another ESX server to protect the VM with no intervention from our side.
• We'll check also the up-time of the VM after the fail over.
• And finally we'll perform the migration of the FT enabled VM in case of planned maintenance.

I hope you will find this video useful, and see the great benefit of the new Fault Tolerance feature in vSphere 4.

This is the third video in our vSphere journey. We'll do the following tasks in order:

• Add our Licenses in vCenter Server.
• Register our first ESX server in vCenter.
• Configure the VMkernel on the ESX server along with enabling the vMotion & FT.
• Configure the iSCSI software initiator and discover the shared LUNs on the SAN.
• Create an HA/DRS enabled Cluster.
• Add our three ESX servers to it.
• Import a Virtual Appliance to the cluster for testing.
• Test vMotion to ensure that the VMkernel is functioning properly.

And by that we set the stage for Fault Tolerance in the next video. I have it already recorded and I will do my best to produce it by tomorrow since it's a weekend over here.

One last thing to note: please bare with the interesting music that plays along with the video, I can't find my flash loops collection, so until I do, you may either mute the music or dance with it. It's really boring watching silent videos, besides, it's almost impossible not to fall asleep from them.

This is the second video in the vSphere4 series, we’ll install the complete set of the vCenter4 components and use a remote SQL server for hosting the vCenter Server & Update Manager DBs. The installation is fairly easy and straight forward, but it has a couple of interesting new features/enhancements.

Happy viewing!

It's fast, it's wild, and it's out of NDA.
I'm furious, I'm excited and I'm off the hook.

If you are a VMware guru, the first few episodes in this series are not meant for you. You would probably be interested when we reach the level of configuring things like the Cisco Nexsus1000v, create host-profiles, or do some FT magic. Between now and then, it's all for the newbies coming to our wonderful virtual world, and have no clue where to start and what platform they should adopt.

I've been willing to do a similar series in VI3 for quite some time, and start from the basics all the way to advanced configurations, but now that the vS4 is out, well, almost, I said why not, it's a learning journey for me before anyone else.

You have to be patient with me however, the video recording is fairly easy, but the editing and production is quite hard and time consuming to present in this format. If you have any feedback, corrections or anything that can help improve these videos, please don’t hesitate to drop a comment or an email.

What are we waiting for? Let’s do this:

VMware Goes Mobile!

You probably heard the news, and seen the nice preview from VMware, but here we will take it from the scratch to show you how easy and fast you can have the vCMA up & running in your VI3/vSphere4 environments. I've published few days back a similar videos for Rove's Mobile Admin, and I believe that both of them complement each other, for my case I would defiantly have them both on my mobile, in fact I'm seriously thinking now to start developing some light applications on BlackBerry to achieve similar results for traditional tasks that require a Laptop & Internet connection. I really miss the good old days where I didn't do anything except coding.

So what we are going to explore in this video is the installation of the virtual appliance, to be followed soon with another one for the vCMA usage on your smart-phone.

Happy viewing!