The whole VCDX certification and process is still a bit of a mystery to many. VMware has been working harder lately to promote the VCDX certification and have additional opportunities for candidates to attempt the defense process. In the past there were only a few blog posts and limited details in the VMware forums about the program. This has grown over the last year as more people have earned the VCDX cert.

VMware has been holding VCDX sessions and mock defenses at VMworld, PEX, VMUGs and even one online via the vBrownBag podcast. These sessions are hosted by several VCDXs from VMware that look to educate the community on the process and increase their chances to passing. This does not mean they are going to teach you how to architect VMware solutions or tell you exactly what you need to know. They are there to help you understand the outline of the defense process and provide some guidance on the design submission process.

Now onto the book review:

The book is just over 100 pages and is focused into two sections. (Preparation & Design and Defense) These sections provide information to help guide you through your VCDX journey.

Preparation:

This part of the book is focused on helping you prepare for both your design, VCDX application and Defense panel. Once you have decided to work towards the VCDX cert documenting your design is your first big step. To help you with direction on your design VMware publishes a Blueprint that lays out details that you need to consider in your design. In the book the authors talk about methodology, what makes a good design and ways to cover the different types of designs.

Once you have your design you will need to complete the VCDX application to submit. This is a request to have your design reviewed by VMware to see if the design you submitted is of a high enough level that you have a fair chance at defending the design.

The last part of the preparation would be preparing for the defense panel. So depending on what you do for a living each day, others are more prepared for this type of thing. Whether you are an Architect, Consultant or Engineer this information will be helpful. Because you make talk to customers each day, but the people sitting on your panel are going to ask you questions you might never hear come out of a customers mouth. So they talk about holding mock defense panels with your peers and other methods.

Defense Panel:

This part of the book takes up at least the 2nd half of the book. The authors talk about what you might be able to expect during the three different sessions that make up a VCDX defense. You’re not going to get the secret handshake, but you can expect some helpful tips that you will need to consider when preparing for your panel.

I recently attempted to defend my VCDX design submission in Sydney in April 2013 and was not successful. I did have an advanced copy of this book that I was able to review. It was helpful in preparing me for my defense day. In looking back the reason I did not pass had nothing to do with being prepared on what to expect that day. It was not being able to communicate to the panel in a concise manor on a few topics. I continue to prepare for my next attempt and hope to have better luck the next time around.

Full disclosure: I did purchase an advanced Rough Cut copy of this book. But I was also sent a free copy to review after my defense was done. I will be looking for an opportunity to pass my copy onto someone else on their VCDX journey in the near future.

The post Book Review – VCDX Boot Camp from VMware Press appeared first on VirtualizeTips.

Location:

In effort to not waste any opportunities I applied and was accepted to defend my panel in Sydney. I did not want to waste any opportunities since there are a limited number of chances each year to defend your VCDX. This is a major goal for me in my job and a personal one to achieve VCDX certification. So I wanted to allow myself another opportunity this year in case I did not pass on this attempt.

Since I live in the US the travel to Sydney would take up a lot of time. It was 20+ hours of travel each way and a 15 hour time difference. I found that this did add extra stress to the already stressful process and I would definitely need to look at the options before making the same decision. I do not travel much and never internationally so many things were new and added to the anxiety that I was already feeling about standing in front of VMware experts to explain my decisions.

Design documentation:

After going through the process I feel that it has been a big learning experience for me and I think just getting my design prepared and accepted was a huge win. I work as an architect in a consulting role already so having been exposed to a large set of customers and doing designs for them made the process a bit easier.

What I did learn is that the gap between what a typical customer might require for a design and what the level of detail that VMware requires for a VCDX design is different. Now this does not mean that you did not consider all the same options and choices, what I do mean is that many customers do not need to be crushed under the level of technical details you need to explain for your application. These details are likely to come out in a later state of your customer project when you are planning or implementing, of course this all depends on the customer and how your projects are run.

So I guess the point I’m trying to make is that after going through this VCDX process I have improved my design documentation abilities and feel like I am able to better communicate my vision to customers. This will continue to improve over time but I feel like all the pain was worth it. The process of trying to communicate your design to someone that has no exposure to the customer or you and have them understand it was a great learning process.

Defense Panel:

I have to admit that this part is one of the more scary parts of the process. The idea of going in front of a panel of your peers to be judged can be scary for many people. I must admit it caused me some stress, but now that the process is over. I have to say it was one of the parts that I enjoyed the most. Sure you are up there in front of 3 VMware employees that are experts in different topics and current VCDX holders. They are going to ask you difficult questions that a customer may not typically ask you, but I found it to be a challenge and learning experience. While I did not pass this part of the process, I think that I learned a lot and will be much better prepared for my next attempt.

I prepared for this in advance by having several mock defense panels. I work with a bunch of very talented people and they were very willing to help with these mock panels. By practicing in the panels you get used to answering questions about your design and I found that as others read my design they looked at things differently. This lead to questions that I did not expect and help me prepare for the real defense panel. I go in front of customers to presentations, briefings, design sessions and design presentations on a regular basis so I figured it would be the same. While this does help greatly the experience is a bit different so I cannot tell you enough how important it is to have at least one mock defense panel with your peers.

In closing I was really disappointed to have failed my VCDX attempt, but I am motivated and will continue to try and improve before my next attempt. There are others in the same boat that are looking for help in these challenges so don’t be afraid to ask for help. I would also like to thank the VCDX team at VMware for the opportunity. They are running a great program over there.

The post Swing and a miss my first VCDX defense failure appeared first on VirtualizeTips.

During the session I focused on the separate parts that make up the Horizon Suite and what was new with each of the products. Since most people are pretty familiar with at least the base functions of View the sessions mostly covered what cool things View 5.2 brings to the table. The Mirage and Workspace parts of the presentation focused more on educating people in whole about the products since these are either new products or not widely understood by most customers. The session prompted some great questions from the audience which is always a good sign that people are listening and interested.

Later in the day myself, Chris Wahl, Eric Shanks and Nimble storage sat on a panel that took open questions from the audience. During this session there was a large amount of interest in the Horizon Suite which lead to more great questions from the attendees. Overall the VMUG meeting was a great day and I enjoy helping the the Chicago VMUG and when available its always fun to present a session.

You can view my presentation from the session by grabbing a PDF version from here.

If you want to learn more about the Chicago VMUG or find out about meetings or connect with the leaders visit the Chicago VMUG Blog.

The post My VMware Horizon Suite presentation from Chicago VMUG June 2013 appeared first on VirtualizeTips.

Also I would like to offer help on future releases with shaking out some of these issues. Myself and teammates have seen a bunch of installs in EUC space and can offer some great feedback. I have participated in many VMware Beta programs, but I think by the Beta stage they are only going to fix major issues. Some of these items make me thing that some of these teams don’t work with end users much.

Things to be aware of:

1. App viability in workspace port. The workspace portal looks at the device your are using and will present apps that your device is capable of running. This makes sense, so it won’t show mobile apps to my Macbook and won’t show it ThinApps either. Now the confusing part is if I’m on a Windows desktop and look at the Workspace portal to view my applications, it will not show me the ThinApps assigned to me unless I have the workspace agent installed. So if I want to look from my laptop rather than my View desktop it looks like I have no apps assigned. While I can see that they are probably not showing them since I wont be able to launch them. But it does confuse users.
2. When looking at the desktop pools you are entitled to in workspace the default behavior when clicking on a pool is to launch the desktop via the Blast protocol. To get the option to connect with PCoIP and a better user experience the user must right click the pool icon and choose connect with View client. This is not clear to users and they are just going to connect using Blast and this will cause support requests. The behavior should be reversed or prompt people to choose when clicking on the pool.
3. Once you fully link Workspace and View with SAML you loose the ability to open the View client and connect directly to a desktop. You must authenticate with workspace and then open desktop from there. This one is more of a heads up, but I kind of expected to still be able to open the View client directly and that it would authenticate with workspace or view directly.

Things to improve on:

1. There is almost no documentation on setting up workspace SSO with SaaS based applications. I know the product is pretty new and the community has not had time to generate the helpful content that many have grown to rely on. But it would be helpful if VMware would have generated guides on how to setup all or some of the SaaS apps that are in the supported list. (Update) You can find some of this information if you go back to the Horizon Application Manager 1.5 documentation for the previous product.
2. The process to replace the default security certificates for the vApp is not documented. When replacing them so that we were not using the default certs, one of the team members had to rely on past experiences and had to dig through old 2011 forum posts to find the password to the keystore in the appliance to get the cert loaded. This is something that is increasingly important due to all the web based consoles on VMware products.

Overall I am very impressed with the Horizon suite of products from VMware. I think having them in a suite for licensing and integration is great and hope they continue to improve them quickly. I do have high expectations for VMware and get disappointed when things do not live up to them.

The post Things VMware Horizon Suite needs to improve on and you should be aware of appeared first on VirtualizeTips.

Now onto what we noticed. Once the vApp deploys the IP addresses of the VM should show up as the static ones defined. Then each VM should also be assigned a NAT address which shows up in the External IP column in vCloud. You can see from the screen shot below. The view shown below is when I clicked on the vApp and then clicked onto he Virtual Machine tab to list all the VMs contained in the vApp. This view shows all of the IP address properly.

Now for the strange behavior. If you take a look at the VM list within the Organization in vCloud you can locate your VMs. But from the image below you will notice that the External IP column is empty. For some reason this display does not populate the External address column. Very strange since the column is there by default and why would it be there if you were not meant to see the details. We noticed this because after deploying we needed to locate our external IPs so that we could connect to the vApp. At first I thought the vApp might not have deployed properly, but after further investigation noticed that the addressed showed up when viewing the vApp.

Sure this is not enough to ruin your day, but I do hope that VMware fixes this bug soon. Little things like this hurts the perception of the product when customers are using.

The post External IP list not showing in vCloud VM list view appeared first on VirtualizeTips.

The Chargeback reporting that is built into vCac is very easy to use but somewhat limited. There are just 3 reports available for Chargeback reporting. These can give you a good idea of what is going on in your VMware cloud but as you grow and mature your cloud you might require more detailed reporting. This is where I hope VMware merges the vCac reporting with the Chargeback abilities that are now included in the vC Ops Suite. With the combined power you would have a powerful tool.

The first report shown below in Image 1 is a Chargeback report grouped by reservations. This is grouped up and sorted by provisioning groups (PG). In vCac a PG is probably closest to what an Organization is in vCloud Director. The numbers in these are just something we tossed in for examples so that we can get some data back. There was not much thought placed on figuring out any real costs.

Image 1

The next report shown in Image 2 is also grouped by Provisioning Groups but shows details on each VM that was created rather than a summary for the PG as in the previous report.

Image 2

The last report is showing allocated resources that are grouped by requester. You can see from the report in Image 3 that we used a few different logins based on AD accounts to create VMs that are reflected in the report.

Image 3

The post Chargeback reporting in VMware vCac appeared first on VirtualizeTips.

UniTrends offers backup and disaster recovery products that

Unitrends, a leader in enterprise-level data protection, offers the #1 all-in-one backup solution for virtual, physical and cloud. Building on over 20 years of industry firsts, Unitrends continues to lead the market.  Unitrends is used by IT professionals for backup of their virtual and physical servers and for performing disaster recovery to remote locations or to private or public cloud.  Unitrends not only continues to set the standard in virtual and physical server data protection, but its US-based support team boasts a 99% customer satisfaction rate, further reinforcing its reputation for quality.

Altaro offers backup for Hyper-V based virtualization. Below is a list of some of the new features in version 3.5.

• Windows Server 2012 Support, including support for VHDX files.
• Backup and restore of VMs located on network paths. (in Windows 2012)
• Volume Shadow Copies of SMB3.0 network paths. (in Windows 2012)
• CSV3.0 and scale-out CSV file shares . (in Windows 2012)
• New and improved Metro-Style User Interface.

To close I would ask that if you are looking at backup products, you take the time and research these companies with your other options to see if they might be able to meet your requirements.

The post Friday thanks to my sponsors appeared first on VirtualizeTips.

This walk through is the process a user would follow to provision a new VM from a blueprint from the portal. Nothing crazy here just a simple demo on what things would look like.

The main portal page shown below in Image 1 is what you will see when first logging into the portal. From this view the user gets a summary of the VMs they have running or powered off, along with info about VMs that are expiring and reclaim requests. To start the process I will click on the Blueprints button shown in blue below, for this demo we created a blue print with a basic Linux VM template.

Image 1

Next you are presented with the list of Blueprints available, there is just one in this example. You can see basic information about the Blueprint here. I can see the name and a daily cost estimate for this if I deploy it. The cost figure is set when the Blueprint is created by the admin. I will click on the Blueprint name to get the process started.

Image 2

When deploying a VM from a Blueprint you will first be prompted with a form like the one shown in Image 3 below. Depending on your access rights you can edit some of the settings of the VM being deployed. This is a different approach than what vCloud Director used, which was tied directly to templates that were built with fixed hardware settings. You could always go back and modify the settings of a VM in VCD once deployed. With vCac it allows these choices up front and approvals and limits can be configured to build rules around what your users are allowed to provision.

Image 3

For this example I did not modify any of the hardware settings of the VM, I just added a description and a reason for the request. The request field is there to offer some text that can be referenced if there is an approval tied to this action. The approver will see your request text so that it just wont be a request with no context around it.

Image 4

In the next couple of steps I will move through the options on the left of this request form. In Image 5 below its just showing me who will be the owner of this machine.

Image 5

On the Storage tab shown in Image 6 you can see the size of the disk that will be provisioned to this VM.  You also have the option to edit settings here.

Image 6

Here in Image 7 you can edit or add custom properties to the VM you are provisioning.

Image 7

The Cost Summary tab shown in Image 8 just shows in cleaner terms what the potential costs of this VM would be. I then clicked Submit to start the provisioning process.

Image 8

Next up in Image 9 I am looking at the My Machines view within the portal, you can reach this page from a button on the main page or the drop down option under “My Resources” at the top of the page. We can now see that my VM is being created and the status tells me what step is being executed.

Image 9

In Image 10 we can see that the process is moving forward and my new VM is now being customized.

Image 10

My new VM is now done and being powered on as shown in Image 11 below.

Image 11

Now that my VM is ready to use I have clicked on it to get a look at the Actions menu shown below in Image 12. From this area you can see what actions I can perform on the VM now that its ready to use.

Image 12

In Image 13 I click the home but to get back to the main screen. If you compare this to what we saw in the Image 1 above there is now more info being shown to me. I now have more tiles displaying information to me. From the calendar below I can see by the date in Yellow that my VM will expire on that date and the Red date shows me the date that it will be destroyed.

Image 13

Image 14 is just showing the drop down menu for My Resources. I’m going to select Expiring Machines to get a look at when the VM that I provisioned will expire.

Image 14

Now in Image 15 I can see a list of my VMs that will be expiring. I have highlighted the field that shows me the date and time.

Image 15

Up last is what it looks like when I choose to edit the properties of the VM after it was created. From here I am presented with many fields that can be edited to change size or settings of the VM.

Image 16

I hope that this walk through was helpful and you now have a better idea of what the portal and process will be like for vCac compared to vCloud Directors portal. I plan on writing up another post about the admin side portal. If there are other vCac topics you would like to read more details on drop me a comment and I will do my best to write about it.

The post How to provision a VM in VMware vCac and edit settings appeared first on VirtualizeTips.

I wanted to say thanks to all that voted for me this year. I will continue to try and write on a regular basis and find topics that are of interest to others. You can see the full list of results via the link below.

http://vsphere-land.com/news/2013-top-vmware-virtualization-blog-voting-results.html

The post Top Virtualization blog voting results are in – Thanks for your support appeared first on VirtualizeTips.

Login VSI simulates unique user workloads with realistic user behavior. The user workloads use the same applications as a typical employee such as Word, Outlook or IE and are available in a light, medium, heavy or multimedia version.

Much like VMware, Veeam and other vendors have done already, Login VSI is recognizing leaders in the fields of VMware, Microsoft and Citrix with licenses to use for their own testing. These can help them with lab testing and be used to create valuable content for the community. I have already signed up and look forward to using LoginVSI again in my lab.

The three leading virtualization vendors: Citrix, VMware and Microsoft offer their own dedicated programs for this elite group of specialists. The Login VSI VIP program builds on these programs and offers a number of special benefits to all active Citrix Technology Professionals (CTP), to all VMware vExperts, and to Microsoft Most Valuable Professionals (MVP) for App-V, Remote Desktop Services and Virtual Machine.

What is included in the Login VSI VIP program

• A free (for non-commercial use) Login VSI Pro license (12 months, 100 user sessions)

• Your relevant blog posts featured on our website

• Login VSI goodies (like the “I love a good performance” T-shirt) when we meet in person

• Direct access to our support, product marketing and development team

To sign up for the program visit the LoginVSI signup page. 

The post LoginVSI creates a VIP program for vExpert, CTP and MVP programs appeared first on VirtualizeTips.