Yesterday I spent most of the time in my office just to figure out another vSphere features called “vShield Zones”. Though the test was running smoothly, the installation & configuration of vShield is not so easy & straight forward as other features that I shared before. There was quoted also in vShield documentation that “vShield Zones installation is a multi‐step process”. To successfully install all vShield components, we have to do it in correct sequence.

What is vShield and how vShield could help us to protect our datacenter?

vShield Zones is an application‐aware firewall built for VMware vCenter™ Server integration. vShield Zones is a critical security component for protecting virtualized datacenters from attacks and misuse helping you achieve your compliance‐mandated goals.

Notes: Even until now I still cant list out in details the advantages of vShield except this :

• You can gain control incoming & outgoing traffic of your virtual environment
• You can monitor open & listening port & services each of your virtual machines

Read more

Just finished with VMware Data Recovery (VDR) testing using my office test environment machine. During the test, I managed to get a number of screenshot and would like to share steps by steps VDR configuration with you all here specially for noobie just like me. Below steps and configuration already been tested succesfully with only single known issue (DNS resolution). BTW, I’m expecting the same result for those who follow the steps as per listed belows.

Before that, it’s good for you to read first the VDR documentation provided by VMware specially on the VDR requirement and troubleshooting section for your furher reference.

My Setup

1. 1x ESX 4.0
2. 1x vCenter 4.0 running as virtual machine
3. 1x Linux VM for backup purposes (VRA)

Note : Since VDR only required vCenter for this purposes, one ESX should be enough and NO VMware HA, DRS and vMotion require for this testing.

Obviously, whole VDR setup can be devided into three :

1. VDR installation
2. VDR Applicance Deployment & Configuration
3. Backup Job Read more
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Just quick one for those want to know how to create NFS datastore on vSphere.
Requirements :

• NFS v3 over tcp
• VMkernel

As for my testing purposes, I choose No-X Linux distro to be my NAS box running NFS v3 with below configuration (/etc/exports) :

/mnt/sdb1 192.168.1.55(rw,sync,no_root_squash)

From above “exports” config we knew that I will only allow VMkernel IP (192.168.1.55) to mount the NFS volume with root & read, write permission. Once finished, I just need to make sure below services are running fine :

• mountd
• portmap
• statd
• nfsd

Note:You can verify this by running ‘netstat -tulpn” command.

Now, I need to create VMkernel for my ESX host and FYI, we can do this from vCenter whether through vDS or vSS. For this example I’m using vSS instead of vDS and for reference, you can check my previous post on how to add VMkernel using vDS here. Read more

During previous vSphere JumpStart training I wasn’t able to show VMware HA feature to my students since we were having some issue to enable it though message shown “HA agent has an error” in vCenter is well known to me. Due to time constraint during the session,troubleshooting is not an option so I left it as is and planning to troubleshoot it when I come back to my office.

So here is my solution. Read more

Buzy with another vSphere JumpStart Training for my existing customers at Mid Valley, KL.

1. No. Of Trainee = 12
2. Participants = Comintel, enCoral, Litrak
3. Product = vSphere
4. Pictures = here

Have to mix the training with VI3 & vSphere modules because some of participants till now they still using VI3 instead of vSphere. So for today, we finished with ESX & vCenter installation for both VI3 and vSphere plus vCenter management inclusive, virtual machine, network and datastore configuration using iSCSI. BTW, we were able to spent sometime with “host profile & distributed switch” configuration too.
ariyossss

athlon_crazy 6:49pm 08102009

Just want to share my experience while conducting VMware JumpStart Training today.

1. No. Of Trainee = 8
2. Customer = SME Bank
3. Product = vSphere
4. Pictures = here

Read more

There will be some confusion on how to create VMkernel & enable vMotion on Virtual Distributed Switch. Unlike when you create vDS from vCenter Networking panel (Home -> Inventory -> Networking), VMkernel only can be created from ESX vDS configuration tab. To do this, go to ESX host -> configuration tab -> Networking -> Distributed Virtual Switch Button. Then click “Manage Virtual Adapter”. Read more