Archive for the ‘Tutorials’ Category

Here comes the second and last tutorial in the Rove Mobile Admin 4.2 series. In this video I used BlackBerry to demonstrate some administration tasks in the VI3 including:

• Exploring the VI environment (Datacenter, Cluster, ESX, VMs ..etc.)
• Analyzing the Events on an ESX host
• Power on VMs
• Searching for VMs.
• Edit VM settings (like memory & CPU)
• Manage VMs using the Mobile Admin WMI
• Connect and explore the SQL server hosting the vCenter’s DB
• Viewing the status of the vCenter’s services, and the ability to start, stop or restart them.

I actualy forgot one of the most important parts, which is the SSH access directly into the ESX servers, I may screenshot that later on, but for now I just wanted to point that it’s possible through the Mobile Admin.

Enough said, let’s get to it..

In this tutorial, which will be divided into two parts, I will demonstrate the installation and operation of ROVE’s Mobile Admin 4.2 which comes with out-of-the-box support for VI3. I found it very useful to have my complete VI3 environment under my control 24/7 wherever I am. If you will be using BlackBerry (my case) you will need to have the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) with MDS. If you are using Windows Mobile, you will just need a normal VPN access in order to get into your corporate network, and the Mobile Admin will take care of the rest.

In the first part of this tutorial I will show you the backend installation of the Mobile admin, and in the second one I will show the actual BlackBerry usage for managing your virtual environment. So, without further ado, let’s get to it..

 External Video Links: BlipTv | Vimeo | YouTube

One of the great features that came out with ESX 3.5 is the NetFlow support. NetFlow is originally developed by Cisco and used mostly for IP accounting and network visibility. In this video we will use this protocol with the AdvenNet NetFlow Analyzer to have a better visibility for our ESX/VMs traffic. VMware still consider this as “experimental” but I’ve been running it in my production ESX farm for more than 3 month now and it’s running flawlessly with no overhead whatsoever on the ESX hosts. I’ve been using also NetFlow since 2004 in many ISPs and Carriers, and it has been always a big hit everytime I use it, mainly for the incredible visibility you get out of it and its ease of use.

Video Links: BlipTv | Vimeo | YouTube

 VMware technical resource: http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/1014 

This is the forth and last tutorial in the SRM series. We will install the SRA, configure it, and then complete the SRM setup to test our first Recovery Plan, actually this was originally two videos, I tried to merge them to avoid too many episodes in this series.

Please let me know you feedback via comments or email to know if you would be interested in more advanced SRM tutorials in future.

01 – SRM Installation
02 – SAN Setup using LeftHand VSA
03 – SAN Replication
04 – Configuring the SRA and completing the SRM setup

This is the third video in the SRM series, here we configure the SAN replication between the two datacenters, and then configure the ESX hosts to connect to the new  iSCSI SAN.

Tutorial List:
01 – SRM Installation
02 – SAN Setup using LeftHand VSA
03 – SAN Replication
04 – Configuring the SRA and completing the SRM setup