If you listen to or attend the #vBrownBags on a regular basis, then chances are you’ve heard of the AutoLab. If you haven’t, then allow me. DUDE, you should check out the AutoLab!

The AutoLab is brought to you by APAC vBrownBag host Alastair Cooke (web/twitter), and our mad genius behind the boards, Nick Marshall (web/twitter). Its mission is simple: to provide an easy way to deploy a vSphere lab on ESXi or Workstation. If you have a laptop with about 8GB RAM and a modern CPU, then you can probably run the AutoLab! Sure, it won’t be like running a quad-socket 8 core beast with 1TB of RAM and EFD, but it’ll get you labbing, and that’s all that counts. If you’d like to get started, head over to labguides.com and download the AutoLab. I won’t go into detail on getting it setup, but I do want to outline a few minor alterations I did to get vCloud Director up and running.

First, I changed up the way Workstation manages the memory. I only have 8GB of RAM in this laptop, so overhead is a bit tight, especially if I’m running my WinXP VM as well, which I use as a personal VM inside my corporately imaged laptop. The AutoLab instructions say to go into Workstation’s Preferences menu and set the memory to “Fit all virtual machine memory into reserved host RAM”, which is essentially a memory reservation within Workstation. That approach works well, and I imagine that it helps to reduce swapping, especially on computers with spinning disks. Since my laptop runs SSD, I wanted to have more VMs running at once without having Workstation complain about running out of memory. I changed the memory setting to “Allow most virtual machine memory to be swapped”.

Another change I had to make was to increase the memory allocated to the Host1 and Host2. Staying with the default 2GB works for vSphere labbing, but once you install vCloud Director, you might want some memory available to power on VMs within vCD. I also went into the DC VM’s DHCP panel and increased the lease times. My reasoning for that is since I’m using the vCloud Director appliance; it does all of it’s setup business based on the DHCP addresses it receives at first power-on. If those addresses change, your vCD won’t run. Sure, you can go in and fix it, but it’s a PITA (IMO), so why bother?

After your AutoLab is setup, download the vShield Manager and vCloud Director appliances. The vShield Manager appliance has a EULA that goes crazy on my copy of Workstation, so I “fixed” it by unzipping the ova (it’s a zip file, after all, just a different extension), deleting the .mf & .cert files, and removing all the text between the <License> tags within the .ovf file’s XML. Before you delete the EULA, you should probably read and understand what you’ll be agreeing to. Don’t bother rezipping into an .ova, just open the .ovf file with Workstation, agree to the now non-existent license (remember, you agreed when you read then deleted it) and let the install complete. Once it finishes, change the network from Bridged to the VMnet3 you created when you deployed the AutoLab, and set the memory to 384MB instead of 3GB. Power on the vShield Manager VM and wait for the startup to complete. Login to the vShield VM using the credentials of admin/default, enter privileged mode with the en command and the password default and type setup. You’ll be presented with a setup wizard of sorts; I used 192.168.199.8 for the IP, 255.255.255.0 for the subnet mask, 192.168.199.2 for the gateway, 192.168.199.4 for DNS, and lab.local for the DNS domain search list. After the vShield Manager setup completes, go over to the DC VM’s DNS panel and create a forward and reverse lookup for the vShield Manager VM, whose hostname will be manager by default. You may also want to setup a DHCP reservation for that IP address (if you want to be extra sure it won’t lose its IP); you can find the vShield Manager’s MAC address by logging into privileged mode and issuing the command show interface.

If you haven’t installed vCD previously, or if you have previous vShield experience outside of vCloud Director, the process is a bit different when using vShield in conjunction with vCenter. First, you won’t need to register your vShield Manager VM within vCenter, as it will be controlled by vCloud Director. Second, if you need to license it for whatever reason, the licensing is handled via vCenter’s Licensing panel. vCenter becomes aware of it once you connect vShield to vCloud Director and vCloud Director is connected to a vCenter.

Next up, open the vCloud Director appliance’s .ova file and add it to Workstation. Be sure to change the two bridged network adapters over to VMnet3, or your appliance will either wait forever for an IP address, or get one from the DHCP server on your Workstation’s LAN. Either way, at this point it’s simpler just to delete the VM and start over. The vCloud Director initial setup will take a while, so be patient until it completes. Interrupting it will most likely break it, so you’ll be back to the “delete and re-install shuffle” if you’re impatient. You’ll know it setup correctly if you can browse to the address displayed on the VM console (minus the 5480 port) and see the vCloud Director setup page.

At this point you can complete the vCloud Director web-based setup, but don’t go so far as to connect vCenter. If you have any troubles with name resolution to either vCenter or your vShield Manager VM, check DNS. When that is done, hop back over to the vCloud Director VM’s console and choose the Configure Network option. Change the hostname to something other than localhost, take note of the IP addresses it pulled from DHCP, save your changes and exit the network configuration screen. Next, choose the Login option, use the root/Default0 credentials and issue the command ifconfig to get the MAC addresses for the network interfaces if you want to do DHCP reservations over on the DC VM. You will want to add forward and reverse DNS records for the vCloud Director VM.

Once all the setup is completed, you can head over to the VC VM and use that to launch the vSphere client and point the browser towards the vCloud Director web page. If the rest of your lab is up and running, feel free to connect vCenter and start building out your provider virtual datacenter.

Happy AutoLabbing!

On Wednesday May 2nd, VMware’s Nathan Small (VMware KB blog) brought the awesome with a deep dive on vStorage Troubleshooting. Check out the video on professionalvmware.com.

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On Wednesday April 25th, Ed Haletky (@texiwill) talked about cloud security on the vBrownbag. Check out the video on professionalvmware.com.

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On Wednesday April 11th, Jake Robinson (@jakerobinson) will present PowerCLI 201 on the vBrownbag, and Josh Atwell (@josh_atwell, AKA “vGinger Admin Extraordinaire“) will be hosting. If you can’t attend this Wednesday at 7PM CDT, make sure to download the podcast as it should be great. Register today!

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Many thanks to Ravi Venkat (@ravivenk) for presenting Part 2 of his deep dive on VMware storage. You can find the slides and video on ProfessionalVMware.com.

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Many thanks to Gabriel Chapman (@bacon_is_king) for presenting and Jonathan Copeland (@virtsecurity) for hosting. You can find the slides and presentation on ProfessionalVMware.com.

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On Sunday March 11th, I had the pleasure of attending CloudCamp in downtown Austin during SXSW. If you aren’t familiar with it, CloudCamp is an “unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas.” It was hosted by Dave Nielsen (@davenielsen), and was attended by a variety of vendors, cloud computing administrators, and folks like me who wanted to learn more about OpenStack and the complementary tool chains & use cases.

CloudCamp started off with a series of lightning talks – which are typically 5-7 minute mini-presentations. The goal is to quickly impart information and ideas to the audience without drowning them in PowerPoint or vendor jibber-jabber. I took a good deal of notes, and present one of the lightning talks below.

Elmer Thomas: Personal Productivity for Developers

Elmer presentation was about applying programming frameworks, tools, and techniques in every day life in order to get things done. Breaking complex tasks or even a bunch of simple tasks down into easily completed pieces accomplishes a couple of things. First, you’re more productive. Second, getting those tasks *out* of your head and onto a piece of physical or electronic paper is a great way to reduce stress. (I can personally attest to this — having 50 different things bouncing around in my head can stress me out; combining that stress along with additional stresses can be mentally crippling.)

GTD (Getting Things Done): consists of breaking projects down into their actions and contexts. Instead of a big list of TODOs, break them down into specific actions that are contextual to where you are or what you need to do. It’s also helpful to pretend that you’re delegating the task to someone else. Write out what you need to get accomplished, not in shorthand but in a way you’ll remember what it was about later.

After you’ve formed a habit of doing this on a regular basis, start adding in a weekly review of captured but unprocessed items, future goals, etc. For an even higher level of  GTD, use it when making 1-2 or 3-5 year plans. Do you want to be employed doing Role X or working for Company Y in 3-5 years? What are the steps that you need to accomplish it, and what are the contexts? Just like quitting smoking or losing weight, reaching your mid to long-term goals requires regular execution and review. Elmer’s suggestion on learning more was simple: Simply Google for GTD.

Agile: Another great idea is to use Agile programming techniques.

• Adopt the Rule of Three: write down 3 outcomes you want for the day, 3 for the week, and 3 for the year
• Use the Monday Vision, Daily Outcomes, Friday Review: On Monday, identify 3 outcomes for the week. Each day you identify the three outcomes you want to accomplish. On Friday, identify 3 things that went well and 3 ways to improve.
• Set boundaries in your Hot Spots to get a better work/life balance. Personally, I think of Hot Spots as a quasi time budget. Decide how much time you want to spend on certain “hot spots”. For example: no more than 50 hours a week on career, 4 hours a week on fun, 6 hours a week on personal or career development, etc. Once you know where and how you want to spend your time, you might find it easier to push back on tasks that try to interfere in other areas.

Techniques: Elmer also had a few great suggestions to help manage time better. The first one is to create what he called a “digital truth dashboard”, or a central point for all of your stuff. It should be simple, easy, and allow you to link to resources or describe where they are. It should be easy to use and available anywhere. If possible, automate it using RSS & APIs.

Another great technique is one that I started doing without realizing what I was doing. I call it “the zone”; it’s usually reached while in a quiet place, and while listening to music with noise cancelling headphones. (Personally I prefer electronica such as dubstep or trance. The beats get my brain going, and the vocals don’t distract me.) However you do it, make sure that it’s effective in removing distractions while encouraging focus on the task at hand.

You can also use mindmaps to help with planning a task or a project. Once you’ve mapped it out, prioritize it, then break it into easily accomplished bite sized chunks. You’ll be done before you know it.

Personally, I thought Elmer’s presentation was highly informative, and it deserved more than 5 minutes due to the amount of content & references. Fortunately, he made it available on SlideShare. You should take a look at it when you have a chance.

Follow Elmer Thomas at @thinkingserious or check out his blog at ThinkingSerious.com.

On Sunday March 11th, I had the pleasure of attending CloudCamp in downtown Austin during SXSW. If you aren’t familiar with it, CloudCamp is an “unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas.” It was hosted by Dave Nielsen (@davenielsen), and was attended by a variety of vendors, cloud computing administrators, and folks like me who wanted to learn more about OpenStack and the complementary tool chains & use cases.

CloudCamp started off with a series of lightning talks – which are typically 5-7 minute mini-presentations. The goal is to quickly impart information and ideas to the audience without drowning them in PowerPoint or vendor jibber-jabber. I took a good deal of notes, and present one of the lightning talks below.

Ben Kepes – Breaking out of the Clouderati echo chamber

If you’ve been involved in the VMware, virtualization, or cloud communities on Twitter, no doubt you’ve heard of the “Clouderati”. According to Ben, the term first started as a joke and over time it stuck. The Clouderati consists of a Twitter list of roughly one to two hundred thought leaders on cloud computing and its various permutations & use cases. While the cloud discussions on Twitter can be very helpful & insightful, sometimes it can be a bit of an echo chamber as it doesn’t always reach the folks who need or want to learn more about cloud computing.

Ben’s goal with his lightning talk was to break out of the echo chamber, and get the word out that there are a number of helpful resources available for folks who’d like to learn more about cloud.

• CloudU – is an online resource that offers “Cloud 101″, an education on cloud computing. The goal of CloudU is help folks learn enough to ask relevant questions (to get the “A-Ha!” as Ben put it). CloudU offers no product recommendations and is vendor neutral. It consists of 10 modules that teaches the basics of cloud computing (why cloud? what are economics around cloud, what are the security implications of cloud? why open vs. vendor lock-in, etc.)
• LinkedIn – The second resource Ben mentioned is the CloudU LinkedIn community. It has a 1,000 or so members and is a great resource to learn more & discuss cloud computing with others.

You can follow Ben Kepes on Twitter at @benkepes or read his blog, Diversity.

On Sunday March 11th, I had the pleasure of attending CloudCamp in downtown Austin during SXSW. If you aren’t familiar with it, CloudCamp is an “unconference where early adopters of Cloud Computing technologies exchange ideas.” It was hosted by Dave Nielsen (@davenielsen), and was attended by a variety of vendors, cloud computing administrators, and folks like me who wanted to learn more about OpenStack and the complementary tool chains & use cases.

CloudCamp started off with a series of lightning talks – which are typically 5-7 minute mini-presentations. The goal is to quickly impart information and ideas to the audience without drowning them in PowerPoint or vendor jibber-jabber. I took a good deal of notes, and present one of the lightning talks below.

Dave Nielsen – definition of cloud computing

Dave initially defined cloud computing according to NIST’s definition (warning: pdf)

• on demand self-service
• broad network access
• resource pooling
• rapid elasticity
• measured service

Dave then followed that with CloudCamp’s definition of cloud computing:

• On-demand
• Self service
• Scalable
• Measured

To put it simply, and to make it easier to remember, cloud computing is “OSSM“.

You can follow Dave on Twitter at @davenielsen.

Hersey Cartwright (@herseyc) did a bang up job of presenting storage clustering on the vBrownbag on Wednesday night. As always, you can watch the video & the SlideRocket deck on ProfessionalVMware.com.

Next week 3/21, Gabriel Chapman (@bacon_is_king) will be presenting on I/O Analyzer. If you aren’t already registered for the vBrownBag, you can register here.

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