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Hewlett-Packard (HP) offers a broad range of OEM VMware software for their HP ProLiant server familiy (VMware Virtualization Software and Client Virtualization with VMware View and VMware ThinApp). A customer can buy HP ProLiant servers and VMware software from HP. This also includes support for hard- and software, which makes it easy in case of support. You only have to call HP and they will do the rest. As you maybe know, I work for a IT solution provider and HP partner. It’s quite common, that a solution which is offered by us, consists of a large set of HP hard- and software. This has benefits for both sides: For us, and the customer, especially from the support perspective. The customer has a multi-vendor solution (HP and VMware), but support is done by HP. The other side of the medal is the financial perspective: The higher the project value, the better the discounts from HP. So it’s quite common that we sell HP OEM VMware licenses and support.

The Cisco Discovery Protocol (CDP) is used to discover and advertise the identity and capabilities of a network component to other networking components. CDP a proprietary protocol developed by Cisco, so it’s often used on Cisco switches and routers. The Link Layer Discovery Protocol (LLDP) is a vendor-neutral discovery protocol, which is used e.g. by Hewlett-Packard. With CDP or LLDP you can easily get an overview over a network topology. You can quickly check, e.g. what switches are connected to an uplink. Both protocols use Ethernet Multicast to advertise and receive information. CDP usess the address 01:00:0C:CC:CC:CC, LLDP 01:80:C2:00:00:0E.

This is more a note to myself, than really new content. Due compatibility to a lot of installed software, I use a german localized Windows 7 installation. This leads to the “problem” that VMware vSphere Client and VMware Web Client launch german localized. This annoys me. I want that my VMware vSphere (Web) Clients talks dirty to me. VMware KB article 1016403 describes the procedure to force a specific localization.

VMware vSphere Client

Sometimes it’s necessary to backup system, that are behind a firewall. A good example for this are servers in a DMZ. When using HP Data Protector there are some things to know and consider, before you can backup systems behind a firewall. Lets start with some basics.

The components

Cell Manager: The Cell Manager (CM) is the backup server itself. It controls the whole enviroments, stores the licenses, clients, media, devices, backup specifications etc.

I’m a big fan of Juniper Networks! I work mainly with the SSG (ScreenOS) and SRX (Junos) series. The Juniper SRX is a network security solution, which can be positioned in the data center or at the branch. You will surely agree, that virtualization and cloud computing changed a lot from the network perspective. This demands security solutions that are not bound to hardware boundaries. Juniper Firefly Perimeter addresses this demands.

What is Juniper Firefly Perimeter?

Juniper Firefly Perimeter is a SRX Service Gateway and it’s delivered in form of a virtual appliance. You can compare it with HP VSR1000 Virtual Service Router or Cisco Cloud Service Router 1000V. Firefly Perimeter is available for VMware vSphere 5.x and Linux KVM. Microsoft Hyper-V is currently not supported. When you take a look into the datasheet you will notice, that Firefly Perimeter can all the cool things, that you expect from this kind of a virtual appliance: From simple routing, routing protocols (RIP, OSP, BGP, IS-IS…), MPLS, VPN, stateful/ stateless firewall, Network attack detection, a lot of management feature and many more.

The PowerShell Integrated Scripting Environment (ISE) is a very handy application when dealing with the PowerShell. And because of this, the ISE is also a very handy application when dealing with VMware PowerCLI. When I write a script or a one-liner, one of the first things I do is to load the necessary snap-ins. And because I’m lazy, I’m trying to automate everything, what I have to do more than once. So how can I load the necessary snap-ins automatically when starting PowerShell ISE? The Windows PowerShell profile will help you. This is a simple text file, or to be more precise, a PowerShell script. Because of this, you can write everything (cmdlets, scripts, functions etc.) in this script file, and it will be executed when you start the PowerShell or the PowerShell ISE. Please note, that there are two profile files: One for the PowerShell and one for the PowerShell ISE. But where can you find the Windows PowerShell profile files? The path to the PowerShell profile is returned by the built-in variable $profile.

While talking with a colleague, she told me that she would like to know more about NetApp. Unfortunately we don’t have a NetApp system in our lab and playing with customer equipment is… mmh…unfavorable. But there’s a solution for this problem: Simulate ONTAP 8. This software allows you to simulate a 7-Mode or Cluster-Mode (c-Mode) system and to test many of the features. All you need is a VMware Workstation/ Player/ Fusion or an ESXi host.

This is a really short post. A first step can be the configuration of CIFS. This is done using “cifs setup” command. After you’ve setup CIFS, you can create volumes and qtrees, you can share them with you Windows server etc. It’s a good start into your Data ONTAP 8 journey.

The requirements

All you need is a configured ONTAP 8 simulator instance and a Windows Domain Controller with Active Directory.

One possible use case for the HP VSR1000 is to build IPsec tunnels for secure data transfer. In this post I will show you how to configure a IPsec tunnel between two HP VSR1000. If you need a short introduction, feel free to take a look at this article.

The experimental setup

We have two server VMs (in this case Windows Server 2008 R2 with SP1) and two HP VSR1000 Virtual Service Router. To simplify I added a vSwitch without uplinks to my ESXi at home. This vSwitch has three port groups. While each VSR1000 is connected to only one site and the WAN port group, the server VMs are only connected to one site. The WAN port group should simulate the WAN link, but in reality WAN can be anything. This is a screenshot of the ESXi vSwitch and port group configuration, as well as the logical setup.

This morning a tweet from Josh Coen (VCDX #129) shocked me a bit:

VCP certifications now appear to have an expiration date associated with them #vmware

— Josh Coen (@joshcoen) March 8, 2014

So far the VMware certification had no expiration date. If you had a VCP for ESX2, this was still valid up to today. I quickly checked my VMware Training account and noticed a tiny exclamation mark above my certifications.