Finally, I spent my whole day in the office just to test the latest vShield on vSphere 4.1 and to be honest there’s nothing much different on the setup prior to this release. The challenge now is, vShield will be installed and configured within Virtual Network Distributed Switch (vNDS) instead vSwitch. Unlike vShield + vSwitch which can be configured automatically using wizard, vShield configuration for Virtual Network Distributed Switch (vNDS) require us to do it manually. However for those who still want to know how to install and configure vShield for vSwitch, please refer to my previous post here.

Since this howto is ONLY for dummies, I’ll try to make all the steps simple as possible and easy for you to understand. However for better and deeper explanation, advisable you go through until finished the vShield documentation.

A. Minimum requirements

This is my minimum requirements and working very well with my current setup

• 1x ESXi 4.1
• 1x vCenter 4.1
• vShield installer (.iso image or zip)
• 1x IP for vShield Manager (vSM)
• 1x IP for vShield Agent (vSA)
• 1x vNDS + Port Group (protected) with 1x vmnic
• 1x vNDS + Port Group (unprotected) without vmnic Read more
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Although the product already been released two months ago, I’m still want to talk about this new vCenter converter with others. I don’t know yet whether there’s such significant improvement with this Converter, but you can expect this converter will able to do the migration for vSphere 4.1 as source or destination.

Notes : Please be informed that this release offer no more support for VCB image sources and this could become a problem to those administrators who still want to do VCB restore via vCenter Converter.

The VMware vCenter Converter Standalone 4.3 officially includes the following new functionality:

• Support for VMware vSphere 4.1 as source and destination targets
• Support for importing powered-off Microsoft Hyper-V R1 and Hyper-V R2 virtual machines
• Public API and sample code for submitting and monitoring Converter jobs
• Support for importing Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 sources
• Ability to throttle the data transfer from source to destination based on network bandwidth or CPU
• IPv6 support

Discontinued Support

• Support of the following operating systems is discontinued:
• Windows 2000
• Windows NT
• Support for OVF format is discontinued
• Support for VCB image sources is discontinued
• Linux installation support is discontinued

Source Read more

So far I used below steps whenever I want to configure SNMP on vSphere 4.1 :-

1)Configure “Public” Community
$vicfg-snmp.pl –server vmvisor03.no-x.org –username root –password password -c public

2)Configure snmp agent to send TRAPS
$vicfg-snmp.pl –server vmvisor03.no-x.org –username root –password password -t snmpclient.no-x.org@162/public

3)Configure snmp agent for Polling (GETS)
$vicfg-snmp.pl –server vmvisor03.no-x.org –username root –password password -p 161

4)Download & Configure Management/Client Trap (Free) http://www.trapreceiver.com/

5)Download VMware MIB from http://communities.vmware.com/community/developer/managementapi

6)Extract MIB & load to Management TRAPS in the following order :-

VMWARE-ROOT-MIB.mib
VMWARE-TC-MIB.mib
VMWARE-PRODUCTS-MIB.mib
VMWARE-SYSTEM-MIB.mib
VMWARE-ENV-MIB.mib
VMWARE-RESOURCES-MIB.mib
VMWARE-VMINFO-MIB.mib
VMWARE-OBSOLETE-MIB.mib (for use with versions of ESX/ESXi prior to 4.0)
VMWARE-AGENTCAP-MIB.mib
VMWARE-VC-EVENT-MIB.mib

Now you should able to receive send traps from ESX hosts configured for SNMP.

Online guide : Here

It’s now available (to all VMware Partner) and some quotes from Vmware source :-

“New Version of VMware HealthAnalyzer Now Available
We are pleased to announce the availability of VMware HealthAnalyzer 3.0.1. HealthAnalyzer 3.0.1 resolves some known issues, and incorporates several previously released hot fixes for HealthAnalyzer version 3.0. In addition, this release is available in a full image of OVF virtual appliance; ThinApp packaged virtual application and a patch file. HealthAnalyzer users are free to choose any of the above options to update their HealthAnalyzer software.
Please refer to the HealthAnalyzer 3.0.1 release notes for a list of fixed issues and an instruction how to apply a patch to the existing VMware HealthAnalyzer 3.0. “

It’s good tool actually for you to do some health check on your customer environment but trust me, don’t just totally rely on this software. Some figure or items you have to manually double confirm for it. Although I never had any problem with the 3.0 Thinapp version before, I recommend you to go through the release notes.

Already 4:25am now but I still at my customer’s site with my other colleagues (Kamil & Lai) doing ESX upgrade. After all challenges that we had at the beginning, finally we are now at the final stage of doing VMware tools upgrade for all virtual machines (VMs). Lai still finishing VMware tools part. Kamil taking a nap right now although we all expecting him to run the show tonight. Unfortunately, the upgrade process running smooth for all ESX hosts and because of that, he can proceed taking nap till we all finish with the remaining task. Me? What else other than assisting and become a shield for both Lai & Kamil when necessary.

ariyossss

Nowadays, email is become very important to everyone and because it’s being used million times by individual, organizations for daily communication, no wonder it’s now become a main target to spread virus, worms, spams and inappropriate contents throughout internet. While we may not able to 100% protect our email server from these threats but what we can do is to keep improve, up-to-date our email security and educate users as frequent and possible as we can.

Since frequent security test can help us to discover some weak point in our email setup, today I would like to share one of my email security check/test by using free service which I found in the internet. Of-course, to test it out and get the best result you should have a complete mail server setup at your home or office. Like mine, this is a good platform for me to test how secured my Proxmox mail gateway has been configured previously.

Internet -> Proxmox Appliance -> Scalix -> User Read more

After long holiday, finally and safely I reached KL yesterday. It’s been fantastic and memorable holiday for me this year. Regardless, the first thing I looked up after I reached my place is? of course DSL streamyx, my ESX, web server and my blog. Anyway, I’m ready to start work with more test lab (VMware & Linux), write some blog, share with others and many more here.