thb3
All things cloud
Why shy away from production in the private cloud?
Mar 1st
Firstly, I personally believe that the cloud can run production workloads, but when moving to a cloud a lot of factors for mission critical application workloads must be considered. Hopefully, this article can provide some thinking points to talk internally about cloud and things to ask your cloud providers.
In the world of cloud, there are lots of use cases that can benefit from the idea of pooled resources. The Test/Development, QA, VDI, Training and Demo use cases all benefit from a cloud since most of them are transient and live for short periods of time. Persistent production as I call More >
Things are getting cloudy
Feb 10th
I’ve been working at Vizioncore, now Quest, for almost 5 years now. I’ve had the pleasure to have worked in/with most of the departments, but I’ve been needing a change. I’m pleased to have been asked to join our Cloud team here at Quest. I’ll now be able to focus almost all of my efforts on our Cloud Automation Platform offering, educating folks about the cloud and more importantly working with large enterprises on their cloud solutions.
I’m super excited,
Thomas
Automating Services based on vCenter Custom Attributes – Updated
May 18th
It’s been awhile since my last post, I’ve been busy traveling around and what not. Today, I’m going to be sharing some new code that does something pretty cool in vFoglight/Foglight. As mentioned in a previous article, you can use Dynamic Managed Components to create services based off any attribute or query you can come up with. Well, what I have to share today will do all of this work for you.
Let’s say you have an attribute in vCenter called Business Units. Each VM in vCenter has a value listed, some are assigned to Sales, some to Marketing, so on More >
VMware Partner Exchange
Feb 13th
I had the opportunity to attend Partner Exchange, PEX for short, this past week. Overall, I have to say I was quite pleased with the sessions this year. Normally, I tend to find most sessions a bit light on the technical part and far to heavy on the marketing fluff. To my surprise, I was shocked that virtually every session was very technical and the speakers could go very deep.
Being that I dabble a lot in programming, and I work for an ISV, I have to say Carter Shanklin’s session “Getting Stoned with Project Onyx” was simple amazing. I’d heard More >
Restoring hidden files in vRanger Pro
Jan 15th
When performing a file level restore, vRanger Pro normally shows the list of files excluding hidden files. To work around this, you simply need to navigate to the directory where the file level restore is being mounted as the vRanger Pro service account. (%USER PROFILE%\Local Settings\Temp\FLR)
For example – I have a Windows 2008 VM that I want to restore some data from C:\ProgramData. In the GUI for File level restore I see this:
As you can see the directory ProgramData is not there, because it is hidden. So I browse to the vRanger Service account’s directory (Administrator.Demo) and I can see More >
Work in Progress – Part 2
Jan 10th
I’ve made the switch to WordPress for my blog, and over the next week or so I will be updating the theme a bit as well as content. Please let me know what you think!
Thomas
Associating Custom Attributes in vFoglight
Jan 10th
I am often asked how to associate a custom attribute in vCenter to a group in vFoglight. To do this in vFoglight we create a Service. For an example I’m going to use the Custom Attribute called “Business Unit” to create service for all VMs that have “Business Unit” set to “Sales”
First, we need to turn on Custom Attribute collection. In vFoglight Pro 6.0, the default collection is to not collect CA’s. To change this, we must navigate to the collector installation path.
- If you have a default installation it is C:\Program Files\Vizioncore\vFoglight\VMware Agent
- Edit the FoglightAgent.WinService.exe.config with your favorite text editor
- Look More >
vFoglight Virtualized – Part 3
Oct 18th
In the first two parts of the series we’ve been talking about the basics of vFoglight and how the system components operate. In the previous post we were testing about 30 VMs, so now we’ve added another 70VMs bringing the total up to 100. Again, we can look at the JVM Memory Usage and Load Estimator to see how taxed the system is.
Figure 1 – JVM Memory Usage
Figure 2 – Load Estimator
As you can see in the figures, there is data growth over time and periodic spikes in load. What is happening to cause the spikes? Garbage Collection, GC for More >
vFoglight Virtualized – Part 2
Oct 8th
Continuing from the last post, we are now going to explore installing vFoglight 5.2.6 into a VM and start pointing vCenters at it.
For the purpose of the test I’m using the following configurations to start and we will grow it as we add more vCenters and thus more VMs or as performance dictates.
vFoglight VM OS – Windows 2003 R2 x86_64 vCPUs – 2 Memory – 2G Hard Drives – 3 VMDKs on Raid Group 2 (only VMDKs on the Datastore) 10G C:\ (OS Partition – 64k aligned) 5G D:\ (Swap Partition 4G Fixed size – 64k aligned) 30G F:\ (Application More >
vFoglight Virtualized – Part 1
Sep 18th
I’ve had a lot of virtualization customers ask me, both large and small, if Vizioncore’s vFoglight will run in a VM or as a virtual appliance. My reaction, of course, is it will run just like on a physical host. vFoglight has always been supported running in a VM by Vizioncore. Like any application you virtualize, there are things you can do to ensure proper performance and more importantly get the most out of the environment.
Let’s look at the different parts of vFoglight and talk about each one. There are three components that can be installed together or installed separately. More >
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