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May 23: Best Practices for Virtualizing Oracle Database and Applications
Virtualization can improve IT efficiency, flexibility and availability, transforming service delivery while reducing costs. The inclusion of business-critical applications (BCA) such as Oracle Database and applications can deliver the most significant value to your business. However, many companies are cautious about including Oracle software in their virtualization roadmap because they lack specific in-house expertise to virtualize the infrastructure for Oracle or because of the perception of risk associated with these projects.
May 24: Introduction to Virtual Desktop Infrastructure with VMware View
Although the capital expenditures for traditional computers have decreased over time, the operational costs of managing these desktops have increased significantly because of the escalating complexity of tasks, labor costs and security concerns. End users are also tied to a single piece of hardware to access all their data and applications, which limits mobility and causes frustration. Learn how virtual desktops using VMware View™ can meet these challenges by providing end-user freedom while maintaining IT control.
May 30: Best Practices for Virtualizing Microsoft Exchange
Virtualization can improve IT efficiency, flexibility and availability, transforming service delivery while reducing costs. The inclusion of business-critical applications (BCA) such as Microsoft Exchange can deliver the most significant value to your business. However, many companies are cautious about including Microsoft Exchange in their virtualization roadmap because they lack specific in-house expertise to virtualize the infrastructure for Microsoft Exchange or because of the perception of risk associated with these projects.
May 31: Technical Deep Dive: Capacity Management with VMware vCenter Operations Management Suite 5.0
VMware has introduced new capabilities to allow VMware vSphere® administrators to proactively manage virtual infrastructure resources. When you right-size and optimize your infrastructure capacity you can increase virtual machine density and consolidation ratios by up to 30 percent, defer hardware and software purchases, and plan for upcoming virtualization projects more easily.
Learn from technical experts how you can take advantage of these new capacity management capabilities to ensure best performance and quality of service in a more cost-effective manner.
VMware has recently added a couple of NEW promotions to their amazing “Cloud Infrastructure and Management”, “Cloud Application Platform”, and “Desktop and End User Computing” Promotions to kick off their 2nd Quarter.
Cloud Infrastructure and Management Promotions
NEW – 50% off vCenter Operations Management Advanced Edition
- May 1, 2012 – September 15, 2012
- Save 50% when you purchase vCenter Operations Management Advanced Edition. Do you need high performance and resource efficiency in your vSphere environments? Purchase now and save more than $1,500.
NEW – 25 Free Training Credits with vCenter Operations Management Enterprise Edition
- May 1, 2012 – September 15, 2012
- Receive 25 education credits ($2500 value) with a purchase of vCenter Operations Management Enterprise Edition licenses. Limit one per customer.
Free Training with vSphere Acceleration Kit with Management
- February 1, 2012 – June 15, 2012
- Free Instructor-Led Training ($3,500 value) with Purchase of Any vSphere Acceleration Kit with Management!
Read more >>
A health insurance provider in Tennessee was recently fined $1.5 million by the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services for a violation that occurred in October of 2009. The violation, a loss of protected health information, occurred when 57 computer hard drives were taken from a training facility while employees were preparing to relocate. The PHI data on the hard drives was also unencrypted. The company also provided free credit reporting to nearly all of its 3.1 million customers since it could not determine the actual number of affected customers.
We all know the complexities and costs of managing large geographically separated fleets of desktops. Just maintaining hardware, OS patches and AV software updates tend to consume all of the small amount of resources that most small to mid-size companies have in their IT budget. And that doesn’t even start to add the complexities of encrypting data at rest on those fleets of pc’s.
An often talked about benefit of Virtual Desktops is data security. However, I’m not sure that discussion sinks in deeply since we’re all worried about how much RAM we might need and how many IOPS we have to plan for in order to avoid the dreaded boot storm. But, this benefit is real and in this case all the thieves would have walked away with COULD have been some dumb thin clients. In the VDI world the PHI that was stored on these disks would have never left the data center and had any of the trainees or trainers stored PHI data on their desktops, the data would still have remained in the data center.
I realize there are long lists of pro’s and con’s along with ROI and TCO models that companies must go through prior to choosing or not choosing VDI but, these 1.5 million reasons go a long way to proving that VDI can provide many more benefits to businesses than just easier patch or software deployment tasks.
EMC recently announced VSI 5.2 for vSphere. From comments I’ve heard, this seem to be a underutilized FREE utility from EMC that can help simplify managing storage environments that support vSphere. The software is now on revision 9 for those of you who like “others” to “work out the bugs”.
For VNXe customers, EMC VSI 5.2 now utilizes the EMC VNXe Advanced Storage Access feature to support cloning and compression of NFS datastores.
For VDI customers EMC VSI 5.2 integrates with VMware View and Citrix Xendesktop providing simplified storage management for those complex environments.
More features, enhancements and fixes are outlined in Power Link. From the home page navigate to the following:
Home > Support > Technical Documentation and Advisories > Software ~ T-Z ~ Documentation > Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) > Virtual Storage Integrator for vSphere >
This tool is definitely worth trying out and keeping up with as it continues to add features.
EUC part 1 of 3
Its day two of FLISH MADNESS and today’s topic is End User Computing.
Recently I was on plane flight coming back from Las Vegas and I looked around half way through the flight to see that 80 % of the people around me were using some type of tablet computing device. I thought to myself the post PC era is truly underway. But, we have a ways to go. First and for most we still have too many devices per person. Case in point, I carry my laptop, iPad and iPhone to every meeting I go on. Ideally we would combine at least two of these devices if not all three.
I envision a world where we have one device (call it an identity disc) where we jack into computing resources (public, private, personal cloud) as needed. Some of us are already taking steps in this direction. For example, the Cisco Cius can be “docked” into a station where you would have the full keyboard, monitor and mouse capabilities of a traditional desktop. From there you could launch native applications, VDI from Citrix or VMware or some type of legacy application presentation.
End User Computing is one of the most spoken buzz terms across all tech industry verticals today. The actual meaning of the term may depend on whom you are speaking with. But what it boils down to is empowerment for users of the users and by users. In IT we no longer live in a world where we have the luxury to control what end point device the users bring to work. We do have the ability to control the corporate data, how the data gets to the end user (including how it is presented), and finally how the data is secured.
To summarize this line of thought, EUC needs three things to be successfully deployed in an IT environment.
Read more >>
VMware has recently announced some amazing Cloud Infrastucture, Management, Desktop, and End User Computing Promotions to start off your 2012 year.
Cloud Infrastructure and Management Promotions
Free Training with vSphere Acceleration Kit with Management
- February 1, 2012 – June 15, 2012
- Free Instructor-Led Training ($3,500 value) with Purchase of Any vSphere Acceleration Kit with Management!
vSphere Essentials to Essentials Plus with VSA Upgrade
- February 1, 2012 – June 15, 2012
- Upgrade to VMware vSphere Essentials Plus with vSphere Storage Appliance for 35% off list price and save more than $2,700.
vSphere Essentials Plus to Enterprise Acceleration Kit Upgrade
- February 1, 2012 – June 15, 2012
- Upgrade to VMware vSphere Enterprise Acceleration Kit for 30% off List Price and save more than $4,500.
Read more >>
In a VMware View environment the View agent running on each desktop keeps log files that are critical to troubleshooting a variety of issues. Typically this would involve interrupting the user’s session to run the “support.bat” file included in installation of the agent. Recently though, I was working with VMware support on a customer issue, and I discovered that these logs could be collected remotely from the Connection Server without affecting an active session.
From the command line on the View Connection Server, change to the directory in which you want to dump the support bundle. Then run vdmadmin -A -getDCT -outfile <file name> -d <pool name> -m <virtual machine name>. It’s important to note that pool name and the virtual machine name ARE case sensitive. For more information on collecting VMware View log files see the following VMware KB Article: http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1017939.
