thb3
Blogging about virtualization
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 >
Capacity Planning – Part 2
Aug 7th
Continuing from my last post about capacity planning, Capacity Planning Part 1, I am going to discuss some of the ways that you can find your current capacity, as well as future capacity. While there are many tools out there that can help you, I’m going to focus on one or two concepts of capacity planning.
So the first thing to consider is how you wish to model your environment. This can be the simplest and the hardest part. If you go ask Gartner, IDC or one of the many large research firms, they will tell you there are lots of More >
Capacity Planning – Part 1
Aug 1st
One of the most talked about areas in systems monitoring these days seems to be capacity planning; and it’s one that’s heavily clouded. The main reason is that every environment is different. Even though we all tend to run similar application stacks, how we use them is unique to our individual behaviors and business requirements.
In most cases this causes us to look for tools that can develop simple models, with virtualization being put into those models. Recently I spoke with several SMB & Enterprise level users and they told me that they’re essentially looking for a way to take a More >
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