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VMworld 2013 Sessions Accepted

June 6, 2013 @vcdxnz001 Leave a comment

Today is an exciting or disappointing day for a lot of people who have submitted session proposals for VMworld 2013 USA and Europe (San Francisco and Barcelona). Notifications for all the sessions that have been submitted will be arriving in peoples inbox. I congratulate you if you were successful and I look forward to seeing many of you at VMworld this year. For those of you who were not successful this year, don’t give up, there may be other opportunities to still be involved and to present, such as part of community events during the VMworld conference. VMware is definitely taking the event to another level and “Defying Convention” this year. Fortunately I was one of the lucky ones and I had two sessions accepted to be presented at both VMworld events. I was a VMworld freshman last year so It’s great to be able to follow up this year. I’ll give you a brief rundown below on the sessions I’ll be presenting with the support of some world class co-speakers.

Discovering HP Technology in Las Vegas

June 5, 2013 @vcdxnz001 1 comment

I am very grateful and fortunate to have been invited by HP to attend their Discovery 2013 event in Las Vegas next week along with a small number of other bloggers from all over the world. This is my first time to HP Discover and I’m looking forward to learning a lot about all things HP infrastructure and applications, especially as it relates to Virtualizing Business Critical Applications and Software Defined Datacenter. HP are expecting 12000+ attendees at the event, which is being hosted at the Venetian Conference Center. One of the interesting stats I found out is that 46% of the attendees are in IT management positions. So that makes it a good place to network. This article will cover some of the sessions I’m going to be attending and looking out for. Note: Travel to HP Discover 2013 was paid for by HP; however, no monetary compensation is expected nor received for the content that is written in this blog.

Categories: Business Critical Applications, VMware Tags: Discover 2013, HP, VMware

The FUD Strikes Back – Oracle Licensing on VMware

June 4, 2013 @vcdxnz001 11 comments

In my original article on the FUD around Oracle Licensing and Support titled Fight the FUD – Oracle Licensing and Support on VMware vSphere I discussed the Oracle Partitioning Guide and it’s relevance to VMware environments. I provided a link directly to the document on the Oracle web site so that you could all read directly from the source. What I didn’t highlight in my article at the time was that Oracle constantly updates that document without notice and without changing file name or version numbers. My records indicate that it’s been changed three times in the past 3 years. Why is this important? Read on to find out.

Categories: Business Critical Applications, VMware Tags: Licensing, Oracle, VMware, vSphere

Is Now The Best Time To Upgrade To vSphere 5.1?

May 23, 2013 @vcdxnz001 7 comments

Upgrading to vSphere 5.1 has been a bit of a hot topic ever since it became a GA product in 2012. The problems some customers have experienced during the upgrade process to vSphere 5.1 have been well documented and VMware certainly received a lot of feedback which was taken on board. But many upgrades still went through without any major dramas at all. I completed a couple of small scale upgrades without any problem just after the GA. The real trouble was when you started to try and integrate into larger scale and more complex environments with more complex requirements. So is now the time to upgrade if you haven’t already?

Categories: VMware Tags: SSO, Upgrade, VMware, vSphere 5.1

VMware and SAP Shake Up Enterprise Applications with Production HANA Support in Hybrid Cloud and SDDC

May 23, 2013 @vcdxnz001 2 comments

I was first involved in virtualizing SAP in 2007, when SAP first offered support for deployment in VMware’s hypervisor. The project was for a large government department in New Zealand. Since then I’ve been involved in a number of large scale SAP deployments on VMware, mainly around Asia Pacific and Japan region. Back then we were trail blazing, and we knew it. But we took a methodical risk based approach and ensured we tested everything adequately (especially performance), the result was it worked just fine. These days virtualizing SAP is much more mainstream. But now we are about to take on the next generation of extreme workloads, which will deliver even more massive business benefits than virtualization by itself has, here I’m talking about SAP HANA and VMware’s vCloud Hybrid Service.

Categories: Business Critical Applications, Cloud, VMware Tags: HANA, SAP, vCloud Hybrid Service, vCloud Suite, VMware, vSphere

Important! Issue after upgrading to vCenter 5.1 Update 1

April 30, 2013 @vcdxnz001 Leave a comment

VMware vCenter 5.1 Update 1 was released a few days ago with a number of great enhancements and fixes. Unfortunately there was also an issue discovered. In some circumstances if you have an admin user account with more than 19 groups assigned within AD you would be prevented from logging into the web client. VMware has released an alert article on the VMware Support Insider Blog - ALERT: Login issue after updating to vCenter 5.1 Update 1 and it urges you to check KB 2050941 (Cannot log in to vCenter Server using the domain username/password credentials via the vSphere Web Client/vSphere Client after upgrading to vCenter Server 5.1 Update 1) for further information and for updates. This has been fixed in vCenter 5.1 Update 1A. Read on for further details.

Categories: VMware Tags: vCenter 5.1 Update 1, VMware

Important! Default HBA Device Queue Depth Changes Between vSphere Versions

April 25, 2013 @vcdxnz001 5 comments

A little while ago I wrote an article titled 5 Tips to Prevent 80% of Virtualization Problems. This article was all about storage and how to configure your storage and the dangers to watch out for. This is because problems in virtualized environments are predominantly caused by or related to storage in one way or another. In that article I explained the impact of queue depths on performance and also some of the dangers of making the HBA device queue depths too high. What I didn’t know at the time I wrote the previous article was that the default queue depth for QLogic HBA’s was changed between vSphere 4.1 and 5.x. This article will being you up to date on the changes and the impacts of the change in default values between vSphere 4.x and 5.x.

Categories: Business Critical Applications, VMware Tags: HBA, Queue Depth, VMware, vSphere 4.1, vSphere 5.0, vSphere 5.1

VMworld 2013 Call For Papers Public Voting is Now Open!

April 24, 2013 @vcdxnz001 Leave a comment

Many of you that have submitted a paper for VMworld 2013 would have received an email saying that call for papers public voting is now open. For those that didn’t get the email I thought I’d let you know that you can now start voting for sessions. The competition this year is going to be even more insane than last year, so it would be advised to get in early and make your top sessions known.

Categories: Business Critical Applications, VMware Tags: VMware, VMworld 2013

vSphere 5.1 Hardening Guide Official Release

April 19, 2013 @vcdxnz001 Leave a comment

One of the most important documents for any vSphere administrator or architect has been released. The vSphere 5.1 Hardening Guide is now available. The guide was announced on the vSphere Blog by Mike Foley – vSphere 5.1 Hardening Guide – Official Release. I’d like to thank Mike and the rest of the VMware Security Team that was involved in putting this invaluable resource together. It has been reformatted from the previous version to make it easier to use. I think you’ll all like the new improvements.