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Archive for January, 2012

VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite Released

January 25th, 2012 No comments

VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite has been released today. This was the major announcement and focus of VMworld Europe 2011 which was billed as “The Biggest VMware Management Launch Ever”.

To recap, the new vCenter Operations Management Suite is made up of two major components:

  • vCenter Operations Manager 5.0
  • vCenter Infrastructure Navigator 1.0 which is a new product

The suite aspect means there is tight integration between the two components. There are workflows to analyse performance which span both components. The suite now also allows seamless upgrades between different suite editions which are Standard, Advanced and Enterprise.

  • vCenter Operations Standard: Performance management with capacity and change awareness for VMware vSphere-virtualized and cloud environments.
  • vCenter Operations Advanced: Adds more advanced capacity analytics and planning to vCenter Operations Standard’s performance management for VMware vSphere-virtualized and cloud environments.
  • vCenter Operations Enterprise: Performance, capacity and configuration management capabilities for both virtual and physical environments and includes customizable dashboards, smart alerting and application awareness.

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VMware PowerCLI 5.01 released adding vCloud Director Automation

January 10th, 2012 No comments

VMware has released what at first looks like a minor update to their PowerShell snapin, PowerCLI to version 5.01. Although just a .01 release which brings the usual changes and bug fixes which are listed here,  the big news is that VMware has added a whole bunch of cmdlets for managing vCloud Director.

A whole new snapin has been created called VMware.VimAutomation.Cloud and this initial release focuses more on the reporting side, so being able to retrieve information from vCD rather than setting things but also does have cmdlets for importing VMs, Templates and .OVFs from vSphere into your vCD environment. This is a great step forward as cloud computing relies so much on automation and having PowerCLI also available means you have so many more options to tie together your automation workflows.

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Installing & Maximising the NetApp ONTAP 8.1 Simulator

January 4th, 2012 33 comments

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UPDATE 7 September 2012:  NetApp has released its Virtual Storage Appliance, Data ONTAP Edge which is a licensed functional VSA.

One of the strengths of NetApp’s storage offering is that its controller operating system called Data ONTAP is the same across every NetApp Filer storage product they sell. This is hugely significant as it means if you know how to administer and configure the smallest FAS2000 Series Filers you are pretty much up to speed to administer and configure Filers up to their biggest and beefiest FAS6200 Series Filers so you don’t have to learn another management interface when you upgrade.

NetApp has also produced a Data ONTAP Simulator which in their words is a “A tool that gives you the experience of administering and using a NetApp storage system with all the features of Data ONTAP at your disposal.”

There have been various versions of the simulator over the years which initially could be installed on a simple RedHat or SuSE Linux box using emulated disks and have the same look and feel as a real NetApp Filer (without the rack space requirement or electricity bill!). Things progressed over the years and you could use more Linux distros. Nowadays there is a pre-built VMware virtual machine so you don’t have to install RedHat or SuSE beforehand.

Unfortunately the simulator is only available to existing NetApp Customers and Advantage Partners and requires a login to the NetApp Support Site, http://now.netapp.com

I was about to start a serious rant about this limited availability when surprisingly whilst writing this post Vaughn Stewart sent out a tweet that NetApp are in fact looking at the possibility of opening up access to the simulator for version 8.1 which is fantastic news.

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