Its that time of year again, where the public vote is open for the VMworld 2013 sessions YOU want to see. You can start voting straight away by clicking here. I have listed the sessions that I have submitted below, and hope that you think they are suitable and worthy of your vote. Session ID: 4517 Title: Deploying a Private cloud with vCloud Automation Center and vSphere Abstract: In this session we will cover the requirements needed to deploy vCloud Automation Center with the end goal of enabling a vSphere environment to become a private cloud. Multiple real world scenarios will be demonstrated with recommendations on best practice and potential pitfalls. Presenters: David Hill and Raman Veeramraju Session ID: 4529 Title: Architecting a Software Defined Datacenter Abstract: This session will discuss the various design considerations when architecting a software defined datacenter. We will start with sizing and scaling and end with […]

DvFilter module is not up on the host
Working at a customer site last week, we were looking at deploying vCloud Networking and Security App into the test environment. Sounds simple right? Well, when we went to install App, we had the error DvFilter module is not up on the host. As you can see by the screen shot below After a little bit of digging around, we discovered the following KB article. http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1028003 This issue can occur due to a previous incomplete installation or due to problems during uninstallation. To resolve this issue: Try the installation/uninstallation from the vShield plugin in vCenter Server. This provides detailed events when the installation fails. Verify if required modules are loaded in the ESX host before installing vShield App using one of these options Reading through the KB article, not all the commands are needed to resolve this issue. To resolve the issue quickly, SSH to your ESXi host (5.x or above) […]

How I see the future of Hybrid Cloud
I have been thinking about writing this article on Hybrid Cloud for quite some time, but with everything going on at VMware, article writing time is becoming limited. Recently VMware announced the new Hybrid vCloud service and I wanted to take a look at the whole “Hybrid cloud model” and what I think (without my VMware hat on) it should actually be/do/mean. Lets start by looking at what the definition of Hybrid Cloud is. This article from searchcloudcomputing certainly sums up VMware’s and most peoples view. A hybrid cloud is a composition of at least one private cloud and at least one public cloud. A hybrid cloud is typically offered in one of two ways: a vendor has a private cloud and forms a partnership with a public cloud provider, or a public cloud provider forms a partnership with a vendor that provides private cloud platforms. My favourite way of describing […]

Looking for Cloud Credibility? New site by VMware
VMware has launched a new site called Cloud Credibility. Its a kind of fun interactive online game where you can build up your #cloudcred. So what is CloudCred? According to the cloudcredibility.com site it is: If you know your stuff when it comes to the cloud, then you’ve got Cloud Cred. Cloud Cred is the hub for all things cloud related. The game is your gateway to building your cloud expertise, broadening your professional network and earning rewards and certifications based on your Cloud Cred score. Looks kinda fun and interesting, I have signed up and going to try to see what I can achieve. If nothing else, you can have the chance to win a trip for 2 to VMworld Barcelona. That in itself is surely worth signing up for. Im off to a good start, having completed two tasks, I now have a score of 502.
vCloud Director and SE Sparse Disks
So the other day, a bunch of us were asked the question: “A customer of ours has asked if the partial writes issue with linked clones that was found in View and fixed in 5.2 with SE sparse disks has also been fixed in vCloud Director Fast Provisioning with SE sparse disks” Cormac Hogan wrote a really great article on SE Sparse Disks, which can be read by clicking here. This is possibly the most exciting new storage feature in the vSphere 5.1 release. Space Efficient Sparse Virtual Disks (or SE Sparse Disks for short) were designed to alleviate two issues. Let’s describe these issues first of all. Problem Statement #1 – Let’s take a Guest OS running on a linked clone (View desktop if you will), and this Guest OS issues a 4KB write. vmfsSparse disk (which is the format used by traditional linked clones) has a block allocation […]