Check out the panoramic photo by clicking the thumb nail below.

Now I hear that they only had 100 units on site and since there were over 200 golden tickets some will have to have theirs shipped to them. You have to check out the website for more information on this headset which is really revolutionary in what it can do at http://www.emotiv.com/. I made a box opening of the one I received onsite thanks to VMware and Emotiv.

more areas of the environment could help find problem areas faster. Not that the additional statistics in 4.1 will eliminate the need for esxtop and other command line or 3rd party monitoring tools today, I am glad to see the progression of vCenter. At the very least we can now see where to focus our efforts a lot better when there is a potential storage issue or bottlenecks.

The new metric groups are shown below in the comparison chart below.

Counters for each of the new storage metric groups.

A good amount of detail is covered in the videos so I think most people will find them very valuable to have on hand. There are demos available on the web page so I would suggest anyone looking to learning any of the topics available on their site to check them out.

I am not sure if anyone else has seen this issue but just in case if your using a windows 2008 network share for vmware data recovery you could get “cifs_mount failed w/return code = -111″ when trying to add it.
A couple things to fix this was that I added the domain and search parameters in the /etc/resolv.conf file of the data recovery appliance which was not there by default. I also had to make sure I was using the dns name in the path because using the ip address still gave me the error. Once those two corrections were made I was able to connect to the windows 2008 network share. Because this was a previously used location I was prompt to import the back information then all was well.
The default username and password is root, vmw@re.

vCenter 4.1 is a 64bit application. This will allow vSphere to scale much higher than it previously could. vCenter 4.1 supports 3,000 VMs per cluster, 1,000 hosts per vCenter and 10,000 VMs per vCenter for an increase 2x or more.

Storage I/O Control which will now allow you to prioritize storage i/o, improve application performance, and set business priorities for storage resources.

Network I/O Control which will now allow you to prioritize network i/o by flow type like (iscsi, FT, and vMotion), improve application performance, and set business priorities for network  resources. This will only work with the Distributed Switch (vDS)  though so if your using vDS this is another reason why you should.

Memory Compression is to be used to optimize the use of memory freeing up space as needed. This feature is to help with memory over commit, reclaim performance, and safe guard against swapping.

Many other features are also included in this new update release around storage performance reporting and array integration api’s, DRS host affinity rules, HA has some more intelligence built into it, vMotion can migrate more vm guests at one time and the list goes on. To find more please take a look at the official release notes for vSphere 4.1. The download is available here.

I am very impressed with what is in this new release and can’t wait to get my lab upgraded so that I can start testing all this goodness. Vmware is definitely showing why they are the leader in virtualization and is raising the bar even higher. The proof or course will be when companies start to deploy 4.1 in private and cloud environments.

My focus was around not needing to have tape media at some of our smaller remote locations but give the local administrators that same backup and restore functionality their used to having with CA Arcserve. If you work with tape media you know that it’s a very manually job that takes up to at least an hour or more a week changing and reloading even with a tape library. The use of tape is still required due to policies within the company so while I don’t see if totally going away I figured that we could at least centralize it. Now for replication I used XOsoft but I don’t see why rsync wouldn’t work if configured properly but we have licensed the product, it’s very easy to use, and provides some nice options. Now I don’t work for CA in any way and this configuration may not be total supported in the way that I am documenting in this blog. If you ask me CA should add the feature to replication their file based backups to remote locations out of the box.

• I am going to keep this simple, the first step is to configure the remote Arcserve server and backup jobs to use the deduplication devices.
• Install the xosoft engine on the remote Arcserve server.
• In the datacenter install the XOsoft Control Service. This can be either on an Arcserve media server or a dedicated server just for the control service software.
• Install the xosoft engine on a Arcserve media server in the datacenter. This way Arcserve is installed on the same server with the replicated data from the remote location.
• Configure the replication scenario to replication the data and index folders of the deduplication devices from the remote site to the central datacenter.
• Once the data is in the datacenter you can either back it up to tape as it is or configure the export to tape which would require more work.

Now, I left out a lot of details here but most of them revolve around the backup job, polices, notifications, etc which should already be known if your using Arcserve today. One thing to remember is that you don’t want to have the locked files in the datacenter. I have seen that if the deduplication devices are setup in the datacenter the replication could fail if it needs to write a changed file. So, if you do configure the dedup device, remove it once your finished or stop the tape engine while the replication is running. The key is to get complete and consistent replication of the data and index directories.

Here is a document that explains the process a bit more in detail.

I did a few videos to show at a high level how this could be done.

Download.

Thanks to the vmware community!

This document outlines the process for creating an RSP vm guest. This document assumes that the reader has knowledge of creating vm guests using Vmware products. It is also assumed that the Riverbed Stealhead appliance is configured for RSP and the users of this document has the appropriate rights to manage the RSP functionality on the Steelhead appliance.

Requirements:

• Steelhead Appliance with RSP Enabled
• Rights to administrator RSP on the Steelhead
• RSP Package Creator 2.1 (or current baseline version)
• Vmware Converter 4.x
• Rios 6.0.2
• RSP 6.0.2

Verify RSP:

1. Choose Configure > Branch Services > RSP Service
2. Verify that RSP is install and running on the Steelhead Appliance

Creating a RSP Package steps:

1. Create the virtual machine in Vmware Server, vSphere, or Vmware Workstation.
2. Ensure that your virtual hardware is Generation 4, 6 or 7
3. Under Settings, deselect “Enable Logging” to disable logging
4. Allocate all the necessary disk space when you create the virtual machine because RSP does not support the grow option and make sure it’s Persistent. Note: 180GB is the Total Max Usable.
5. Remove the following – external adaptors, such as sound cards, USB interfaces, CDROM, and floppy adapters.
6. Network Adapter needs to be Bridged and make sure it Connects at Power ON.
7. Install the Windows Server guest operating system on the virtual machine.
8. Install VMware Tools on the virtual machine.
9. Configure services on the virtual machine guest operating system.
10. Using Vmware Converter convert the virtual machine to the local drive
11. Make sure that the lines below are removed from the vm guests *.vmx file or you will receive an error in the next step.

ide0:0.present = “TRUE”
ide0:0.autodetect = “TRUE”
ide0:0.filename = “auto detect”
ide0:0.deviceType = “cdrom-raw”

Using the Riverbed Package Generator Wizard to package up the vm guest:

1. Start the Package Generator Wizard. The Welcome page appears.
2. Browse to the folder that contains the virtual machine you created. For example, on a Windows operating system, the virtual machine is located in the “C:\virtual machines” folder.
3. Click Next to display the RSP Package Configuration page.
4. Configure the package Name, Version, and Description.
5. Set “Enable Watchdog” setting to NO.
6. Change the “Reboot VM On Failure” to Yes.
7. Click Next to display the Network Interface Preferences page.
8. The available virtual machine network interfaces appear under Available Virtual Machine Network Interfaces.
9. Configure the management interface by clicking Add.
10. Click Next to display the Ready to Generate RSP Package page.
11. Click Browse to locate the folder in which to store the RSP package.
12. Enter a name for the RSP package or select an existing file (the file will be overwritten). Do not include spaces in the filename. Riverbed recommends the extension .pkg.
13. Under Compression, set the compression level. (Default setting is fine)
14. Under Configuration, click “Save Configuration” to permanently save the configuration.
15. Click “Create Package”
16. Click Finish to close the Package Generator Wizard when the Package Creation is Completed.
17. Upload the RSP package to an ftp or scp server. You can also use an HTTP server or a laptop if your RSP package is not larger than 2 GB.
18. If you use the cli to upload ssh to the appliance then enter:

• • enable
  • conf t
  • rsp package fetch ftp://

Add RSP Package:

1. Choose Configure > Branch Services > RSP Packages to display the RSP Packages page.
2. Under Packages, complete the configuration as described in the following table.

To install an RSP package in a slot:

1. Choose Configure > Branch Services > RSP Packages to display the RSP Packages page.
2. Under Slots, click the slot name and complete the configuration as described in the following table.

1. Click Save to save your settings permanently.
2. Note: To disable a package, click the slot number and then click Disable Package.

Enabling a Slot:

1. Choose Configure > Branch Services > RSP Packages to display the RSP Packages page.
2. Under Slots, click the slot name and click Enable Slot to enable the slot.
3. The slot status changes to enabled.
4. Click Save to save your settings permanently.

Check out my blog that goes over my experience with RSP.