Vmware

In 2008 HP acquired LeftHand Networks for “only” $360 million. In relation to the acquiration of 3PAR in 2010 ($2.35 billion) this was a  really cheap buy. LeftHand Networks was a pioneer in regard of IP based storage build on commodity server hardware. Their secret was SAN/iQ, a linux-based operating system, that did the magic. HP StoreVirtual is the TAFKAP (or Prince…? What’s his current name?) in the HP StorageWorks product familiy. ;) HP LeftHand, HP P4000 and now StoreVirtual. But the secret sauce never changed: SAN/iQ or LeftHand OS. Hardware comes and goes, but the secret of StoreVirtual was and is the operating system. And because of this it was easy for HP to bring the OS into a VM. StoreVirtual Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) was born. So you can chose between the StoreVirtual Storage nodes (HW appliances) and the StoreVirtual VSA, the virtual storage appliance. This article will focus on the StoreVirtual VSA with LeftHand OS 11.

In addition to the benefits that VMware grants to vExperts, a couple of vendors grant also benefits to vExperts. This includes free licenses, subscriptions or other offers. This is only a loose compilation of vExperts benefits.

Vendor	Offer	Link
Solarwinds	Virtualization Manager NFR	http://bit.ly/1gYJtBB
Veeam	Backup & Replication NFR	http://bit.ly/1esRaFn
Pluralsight	Annual Plus Subscription	http://bit.ly/1esTa0o
Tintri	Polo Shirt	http://bit.ly/1eJqgE2
Devolutions	Remote Desktop Manager 1y NFR	http://bit.ly/1iRVXfm
Login VSI	VIP program	http://bit.ly/1esPY4M
Hewlett-Packard	StoreVirtual VSA NFR	http://bit.ly/1m4J6gt
Darren Woollard	Sticker & URL Shortener	http://bit.ly/1noB4gb
DataCore	SANsymphony-V NFR	http://bit.ly/1iUXd2N
Proximal Data	AutoCache NFR	http://bit.ly/1eLKoWa
VSS Labs	vCert Manager NFR	http://bit.ly/1eTncKP
Unitrends	Enterprise Backup for VMware or Hyper-V NFR	http://bit.ly/1eWqn4Q
Symantec	Backup Exec V-Ray Edition NFR	http://bit.ly/1eTFcEO
Royal TS	Royal TS/X NFR	http://bit.ly/1jtpNbB

I also recommend to check the following blog post:

Already in the last year I noticed, that Pluralsight was giving tech VIPs one year of free subscription for their online training. This 1y subscription has a value of $499! Yesterday I saw a tweet with the offer for this year’s tech VIPs.

Congrats to the 2014 #vExperts & #MicrosoftMVPs! Did you know that you get 1 free YEAR of Pluralsight training? ==>http://t.co/5rFFs1e9Bx

— Pluralsight (@pluralsight) April 3, 2014

https://twitter.com/pluralsight/status/451823968228761602

To use this offer, you have to be member of at least one of the following programs:

The VMware vExperts program is a annual given title from VMware to individuals who have significantly contributed to the community. It’s an award for sharing their knowledge with the community. It’s a nice way to say “Thank you” from VMware.

There are three different tracks you can apply:

The Evangelist Path is for bloggers, authors and other members of the community, who demonstrate their passion and knowledge.

The Customer Path is for customers. This includes leaders of VMware customer organizations, like the VMware User Groups (VMUG), speakers, customers who helped to create customer success stories etc.

A discourse is going on in the community. I can’t say who has started the discourse, but the number of blog postings to this discourse is an indication for the interest at this topic. But what’s the topic?

Homelabs

A homelab is the datacenter of the poor man. Some people have the luck to use a fully populated data center for test and study purposes. Our job requires to work with the latest technology and products, so we need an environment for test- and study purposes. Back in the days it was sufficient to have some VMs on you computer or laptop. But as virtualization moved into the data center, it was necessary to have this in the lab. At this point homelabs began to explode.

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

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.