Hands-On Labs at VMworld 2015

I have to say, this year the Hands on Labs are by far the best that they have been in years.  If you haven’t had a change to get to them i REALLY recommend them.

One thing that was really really nice is the labs are crazy comprehensive this year.  In fact most of them are impossible to finish in the 90 minutes allotted for your lab session.  All of the labs are made of a various modules.  In each of the ones i have done, these modules can all be done independently.  For example, i did a “Troubleshooting vSphere 6” lab where the beginning were basics and then it got into some pretty deep troubleshooting.  I didn’t need to esxtop basics so i was able to skip ahead a few modules and get to the stuff i wanted to see in it.

One thing i don’t know yet is if they will be available after VMworld via the projectnee portals.

For a listing of the labs you can go to this webpage or you can download a cool PDF of the labs.

Good morning VMworld 2015 Day 1

Good morning VMworld Attendees and those at home.  Today is the start of the excitement.  If you have no idea what VMworld is…and somehow i doubt that.  You can check it out here. VMworld 2015

Anyway today should be filled with some good announcements from VMware.  There have been quite a few rumors floating around, so we’ll see what actually comes out.

In addition i plan on checking out some cool sessions, wandering the floor a bit and then Monday night is usually the night where many many of the vendors have their parties afterward.  My biggest piece of advice on that is to pace yourself. 🙂

Headed to VMworld 2015

Welp i’m at the airport, heading to San Francisco to go to VMworld.  I was graciously accepted as one of the official VMworld bloggers this year!!  Huge thanks to VMware for that honor.  I will be post a lot of cool info, tips & tricks and anything else i can find to this site and my twitter feed all week. (@ck_nic)

Look forward to some cool posts 🙂

vSphere 6 Mis-information FIXED

Prior to the launch of vSphere 6, as a vExpert, i was given the opportunity to include my blog in some of the VMware release info.  Unfortunately, what most of us RC users and bloggers were not told, who don’t work for VMware anyway, is that the RC code we had vs. the GA code was not exactly the same.  There were some feature changes, in some cases pretty large, that would be happening to GA.  This lead to a lot of misinformation out in the wild, including from me.

Anyway, it is what is was and so that i do not continue to spread mis-information.  I have made sure to update all of my vSphere 6.0 articles to reflect the correct GA information.

Below is an excellent article of the mis-information out there.

http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere/2015/02/vsphere-6-clarifying-misinformation.html

#28DaysVSphere CrowdChat on vSphere

With the announcement of vSphere 6 and its impending release.  I’ve been given an awesome opportunity to join some excellent respected leaders in the vSphere space and got to participate in a vSphere CrowdChat.  Below is the live stream and transcript.  Read on for some great questions and answers from the community at large.

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What’s new & cool in vSphere 6?

So vSphere 6 is finally here!!  VMware has given us some pretty big new features as well as some great updates to some already existing.  I will go over these at a high-level here and will be diving into each of these, and then some in the next few articles.  So lets dive right into the cool stuff.

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vSphere 6: Multi-Processor Fault Tolerance

With the announcement of vSphere 6.0, one very cool feature that is new is Multi-Processor Fault Tolerance.  You can now turn FT on for VMs with up to 4 vCPUs.  This now opens up Fault-Tolerance to a much larger host of VM workloads.  Previously the single vCPU limit excluded almost all server type workload.  Update: Doing vCenter FT will be supported in a few limited cases, this is still being worked out by VMware.

To set it up, it is exactly the same as it has been. First, ensure that you have a VMKernel NIC configured for Fault-Tolerant traffic. Then, right-Click on a VM and choose “Turn on Fault Tolerance”.  Then choose the location for the Files and then choose a ESXi host that will host the secondary VM, that simple.

One thing to keep in mind is the networking requirements.  Since the CPU instructions are being mirrored between the hosts there can be a quite a bit of Network traffic.  I have already seen that a 4x vCPU VM can start to consume a pretty good amount of network traffic.  I would absolutely have at least a 10gb link dedicated for this purpose.

vSphere 6 now supports NFS v4.1 with Authentication

VMware finally supports NFS version 4.1 and even allows Kerberos authentication.  This now allows administrators to use features that were brought to the NFS kernel back in 2010.  The biggest advantage in my mind is the ability to have “Multi-pathing” on your shares.  You can now have multiple IP addresses associated with a single NFS mount for redundancy.  In addition you can now provide more authentication for the mounts other then IP Addressing.  You can now use Kerberos to authenticate the ESXi hosts.  Now you must be using AD and that the ESXi host must joined to the domain, and that you’ve specified the NFS Authentication Credentials (which are in System -> Authentication Credentials on each host).

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