This week was the last week of the VCDX defenses in EMEA. I loved doing it and wished we had these defense panels every week. We certified three people this week and unfortunately some did not pass the exam. I believe we are up to VCDX 028 right now. For those working towards the VCDX Certification, the next opportunity for the Design Defense is Partner Exchange in Las Vegas. But that is not the topic of this article. This article is all about last weeks Planet V12n blog articles. We had numerous excellent articles again and like always it was tough to pick a top 5. This weeks top 5 contains two “new comers” to the blogosphere, welcome Luc Dekens and Andrew Hald. Enough of the small talk here we go:

• Luc Dekens – Scheduled Tasks – MethodAction
  In the PowerCLI Community there was a recent question on how these Scheduled Tasks can be created from PowerShell (see relocate vm’s from csv file and create schedule task in VC).

  Being able to create a Scheduled Task for a svMotion for several guests from a PowerShell script, instead of clicking away in the vSphere Client, would be another step on the path of vSphere automation.

  The current PowerCLI 4 (build 162509) unfortunately has no cmdlets for Scheduled Tasks. But the SDK contains the CreateScheduledTask method that can be used for this purpose.

  The key parameter to this method is the ScheduledTaskSpec object. In the action property of this object you specify which type of action you want the scheduled task to take. If we want to schedule a Task, we will have to select the MethodAction extension object.

• Andrew Hald – The Commodity Hypervisor
  This morning Dan Kusnetsky posted a blog entry discussing how VMware is “Facing Challengers on all Sides.” I have followed Dan’s blog for some time now and don’t always agree with his conclusions. In this post, he outlines each of the players in the virtualization industry and their angle at dethroning VMware as the “King of Virtual Machine Technology.”

  http://blogs.zdnet.com/virtualization/?p=1383

  Dan states that the hypervisor is becoming a commodity. While this may be true in price (Microsoft, Citrix and VMware all offer their hypervisors for free), this is not true for customers and real world virtualization deployments. The hypervisor is not even close to being a commodity yet. The other players would like you to believe that they are on par with VMware, but they are not in the same league.

  A commodity is defined as “some good for which there is demand, but which is supplied without qualitative differentiation across a market.” Thus all hypervisors would have to provide the same features for the same total cost to be defined as commodities. When comparing the players in the virtualization market, we immediately see that this is not the case.

• Eric Sloof – Massive I/O power increase using EMC PowerPath/VE
  You’re about to enter a world where creating a Virtual Machine hot-clone is done faster than powering it off. My former Capgemini colleagues, Ernst Cozijnsen and John van der Sluis recently implemented EMC PowerPath/VE, here’s their story.

  It took the guys in storage land a long time to deliver…. But finally it’s there…. A really great kick-ass plug-in to boost your vSphere 4 storage performance through the roof. In prior versions of ESX the Native Multi Pathing “NMP” plug-in was
  available for balancing the storage load over different Fiber Channel
  HBA’s and storage paths to your storage array(s). Beside that it’s not
  really “Multi Pathing” it had another major disadvantage of being able
  to stress your storage array in such a way it could crash.

• Eric Siebert – What is virtualization?
  If you work with virtualization for a living, inevitably you’ll be
  asked what virtualization is. Trying to explain it to someone who
  doesn’t work with computers can often be challenging, and after you
  explain it they still may not know what it’s about. So how do you explain it to someone for the first time? I find that
  using analogies that anyone can relate to is a good way to explain
  things to people. Before I attempt a virtualization analogy I’ll try
  explaining it in basic computer terms. Virtualization software, also called a hypervisor, emulates computer
  hardware allowing multiple operating systems to run on a single
  physical computer host. Each guest operating system appears to have the
  host’s processor, memory, and other resources all to itself. The
  hypervisor, however, is actually controlling the host processor and
  resources and allocates what is needed to each operating system, making
  sure that the guest operating systems (called virtual machines) cannot
  disrupt each other.
• Cody Bunch – A Quick PowerCLI Lesson – Digging for Info (Who Powered Off that VM)
  This gives us an idea about the information we’re looking for, as
  well as provides us a place to start looking. Let’s dip into the
  PowerCLI:
  [vSphere PowerCLI] C:\> $vm = Get-VM | where { $_.Name -eq “Wiki” }
  
  What this does is set the variable $vm to the object that represents
  our VM. What is an object? For our use an object is anything in your
  Virtual Infrastructure, and the properties and methods that belong to
  it. Take a turtle for example (yes… turtle, hang with me). That turtle
  will have some properties: breed, gender, length, weight, etc.

It was VCDX Defense week this week in Frimley and there were several panels scheduled. I met some cool people and learned a lot during this week. Next week there are VCDX Defense panels in Munich! If you are working towards VCDX, don’t forget that panels normally are only scheduled around VMware Events. This means that there are only a couple times per year you can get certified. Blog wise there were a lot of great posts again this week. It was hard to pick only 5, but I did manage to do so:

• Frank Denneman – Lefthand SAN – Lessons learned
  Blocks will be stored on storage nodes according to replication level.
  If a LUN is created with the default replication level of 2-way, two authoritative blocks are written at the same time to two different nodes.
  If a 3-way replication level is configured, blocks are stored on 3
  nodes. 4-way = 4 nodes. (Replication cannot exceed the number of nodes
  in the cluster)
  SAN IQ will always start to write the next block to the second node containing the previous block.
• Duncan Epping -  Slot sizes & Alan Renouf – HA Slot size information
  Five hosts, each host has 16GB of memory except for one host(esx5)
  which has recently been added and has 32GB of memory. One of the VMs in
  this cluster has 4CPUs and  4GB of memory, because there are no
  reservations set the memory overhead of 325MB is being used to
  calculate the memory slot sizes. (It’s more restrictive than the CPU
  slot size.) This results in 50 slots for esx01, esx02, esx03 and esx04. However,
  esx05 will have 100 slots available. Although this sounds great
  admission control rules the host out with the most slots as it takes
  the worst case scenario into account. In other words; end result: 200 slot cluster
• Eric Siebert – New Twitter lists for the top bloggers and VMware/Virtualization people
  Twitter is a great tool for communicating with other virtualization
  professionals, but trying to find interesting people to follow
  especially if you are new to Twitter can be time-consuming and
  difficult. For that reason I put together some Twitter group lists to
  make following people that are related to VMware virtualization easier.
  The first list is just from my Top 20 blogger list on my vLaunchpad that was decided by a poll I did months ago, consequently that one was really easy to put together.
  The second list is the top 100 people to follow that are related to
  VMware & virtualization, this one wasn’t easy at all to put
  together. The list started at about 300+ people that was part based on
  my followers and followings of other popular virtualization bloggers.
  Once I discovered that TweepML had a limit of 100 people I had to
  really trim that list down a lot, that wasn’t an easy task, especially
  the last 20 or so. There were some people I really wanted to keep on
  there but was forced to remove, the 100 person limit made for some
  difficult decisions.
• Hany Michael – vSphere 4.0 vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS) – Video Demonstration + Architecture Diagram
  The diagram reflects the exact configuration on the video. I’ve
  done this intentionally to make it easier and faster for any one new to
  the vDS to understand the concept and the various configuration aspects. As I mentioned above, due to the very short period of time that I
  had, I will most probably modify small parts in the diagram to achieve
  better results. You can come back and check the version number of the
  diagram to download the latest updates.
• Scott Drummonds – Top Five VROOM! Entries for 2009
  I love VMware’s performance blog, VROOM!  It is our most popular
  performance communication vehicle and its content is backed by a
  stellar engineering team with unmatched integrity.  Each article
  details the nuances of VMware performance and educates on application
  and platform best practices.  I love all the articles but am always
  surprised as to which our readers find most popular.  Here is a
  countdown of the five entries most read in 2009.