DoubleCloud => Private Cloud + Public Cloud

The distributed virtual switch introduced in vSphere 4 has many benefits over the traditional switch. For one thing, you no longer have possible glitches with live migrating virtual machines from one host to another using traditional switches, and all your port settings go with your virtual machines.

If you have virtual machines using traditional switches, you can easily move them to new distributed virtual switches. The rest of this article explains how to achieve this.

You can use the  Read more...

After my last post Tagging: An invisible feature in vSphere, William Lam quickly followed up with another post in his blog, arguing vSphere Tagging Feature Not So Invisible. He made his case by showing how you can actually add and remove tags using addTag() and removeTag() method via vSphere MOB. You can definitely play with your test environment, but please do not mess up with any existing tags in your production environment.

Although you can do that via MOB, it’s not the officially supported way (BTW, this should not be taken as show stopper. After all,  Read more...

If you are familiar with social media or research papers, you must know tagging already – You use keywords to label an entity, be it a blog post, an article, or something else, so that it can be easily searched out. So it’s a very useful feature in managing information.

In vSphere 4.0, VMware added tagging capabilities to the managed entities. According to the API reference of 4.1, it’s still an experimental feature and  Read more...

There was recently a question in the open source VI Java API forum regarding the OptionManager. As you may have known, the OptionManager is used to manage key value pairs, for example, the “VMFS3.HardwareAcceleratedLocking” is a key as shown in the code included in the question. Somehow the code to set the key, as shown below, doesn’t work with com.vmware.vim25.InvalidArgument exception.  Read more...

After publishing the tech talk slides, I am happy to announce that the record is ready now. If you have missed the onsite or online session, or simply want to watch it again, please feel free to click here. Note that you will need Adobe Flash 10.1 or higher to view the recording.

Many thanks to my colleague Luke Kilpatrick (@lkilpatrick) for helping with online streaming and recording, and Matt Dhuyvetter for setting up the top quality audio feeds!

Recently I stumbled at a book Things That Make Us Smart by one of my favorite authors Donald Norman. In the book, he shared many insights on the complex human machine interactions, “arguing for the development of machines that fit our minds, rather than minds that must conform to the machine.” By the way, I highly recommend his another book The Design of Everyday Things.

Because I just blogged about IT automation, I still have that topic on my mind. So when I read the book, I did quite a lot of reflective thinking around IT automation. In general, I feel  Read more...

Distributed Power Management (DPM) is a powerful (powerless, really) feature can reduce host power consumption in a DRS cluster. It works in either manual mode or automatic mode only when DRS is enabled. DPM can place idle hosts into standby mode, or awaken them from standby when more resources are needed.

Like most of the features in vSphere, you can manage them with the APIs. A recent question at the open source vSphere Java API forum asks how to get hold of the DpmBehavior data object. This seems easy but  Read more...

In business world, we hear frequently the word “focus.” To achieve business goals, for example, deliver software, it’s absolutely necessary to focus on the projects and priorities. Teams that focus on execution typically perform better than others that don’t.

It’s, however, not a good idea to focus all the time. In fact, human beings have limited period of attention. Passing that period hurts one’s effectiveness – one explanation, perhaps, for why long working hours don’t deliver proportional results – not to mention the detrimental effects on one’s health.

Moreover, focusing really narrows  Read more...

This is the wrapping tech talk at our last community meetup by Jeff Hu who is the tech lead on vSphere APIs. Based on his 7 years of experience since the inception of vSphere API, Jeff shared his insights on the design of vSphere API, and what can be done for better ease of use and consistency. In my opinion, this is a must read for anyone who is interested in VMware management APIs.

Disclaimer: The presentation contains forwardlooking, exploratory ideas and should not be interpreted as a statement of official product direction by VMware.  Read more...

This talk is by William Lam (@lamw) regarding his famous vGhetto project at our community meetup. Check out what vGhetto project is and what it means to you:  Read more...

This talk is by Dave Briccetti (@dcbriccetti) who is an independent consultant working at VMware on vCloud related project. He is also a committer on the Lift framework for building Web applications in Scala.

Here is his slides:  Read more...

This talk is by Steven Wong who is an architect working at EMC on various backup and virtualization projects. If you are using C or C++ with gSOAP to manage vSphere, this talk is for you.

Check it out below:  Read more...

This is by Boris Strongin, VP Engineering and Co-founder, Hytrust Inc at our first community meetup on May 18. He reviews new security, auditing, and compliance challenges coming with cloud multi-tenancy, and approaches to address them.

Check out these slides for his insights:  Read more...

This is the tech talk by Elsa Bignoli, who is now a Software Engineer at Altor Networks (part of Juniper now). Elsa is one of the contributors to our open source vSphere (VI) Java API.

Check out her presentation slides below:  Read more...

This is the tech talk by Giridhar Padmanabh(@girip26), who is now a Sr. Manager at Cisco. He joined Cisco not long ago with the newScale acquisition. This tech talk draws on his 7 years of experience at newScale building industry leading software for delivering private cloud as a service.

Check out the slides below:  Read more...

We had a great community meetup last Wednesday. Check out this post for the photos. Thanks to the speakers, we have the tech talks slides ready for you. If you have missed the event last week, just check out these slides in PDF format. At the same time, we are working to make the recording available. So stay tuned for announcement.

Here is the talk is by me. I reviewed the history, current state, and future road map of the open source vSphere Java API. In the end, I also shared 3 success factors for  Read more...

Weeks ago I had a great conversation with Vanessa Alvarez (@VanessaAlvarez1) who is an analyst with Forrest Research. Among other topics, we discussed datacenter automation because we’re both interested in it. After Vanessa tweeted about her automation dream, several follow-up tweets came up.

In general, I think automation is a vague word in IT world, and it mostly means different things to different people. This is especially true when we talk about automation together with integration. This article tries to define automation from my understanding and perspective. Please feel free to share your thoughts in comments.

From high level, automation is the opposite to  Read more...

My colleague John Troyer (@jtroyer), who hosts VMware Communities Roundtable, has posted an interview with Alan Renouf (@alanrenouf) and me about our thoughts on VMware SDKs, APIs, and CLIs on May 18. During the interview, I answered questions about the open source vSphere Java APIs, the themes of my blogs (why it’s called doubecloud), what I am doing now at VMware, and of course our first community meetup event on the same day. If you have missed the session, you can listen to it now: , or here.  Read more...

Our first community meetup event on Wednesday night was a great success. It attracted about 200 developers/QAs and administrators globally either on site or online with live streaming. An EMC development team flied all the way from Irvine to join us; so did Huawei Symantec from Chengdu of China.

At the end of the meetup, we gave way 20 copies of these books: VMware VI and vSphere SDK by me, VMware vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS Technical deepdive (Volume 1) by Duncan Epping, VMware vSphere PowerCLI Reference: Automating vSphere Administration by Luc Dekens and Alan Renouf, and VMware ESX and ESXi in the Enterprise: Planning Deployment of Virtualization Servers (2nd Edition) by Edward Haletky; and many gadgets.

We know our attendees took their personal time mainly not  Read more...

After preparing the event for almost two months, we are finally ready. If you join us onsite, here is direction to our venue. We have free food/drinks, and many books/gifts waiting for you, thanks to our sponsors and 12 volunteers.

If you join us online, we have a great news for you. Instead of WebEx, we will have a live broadcasting. Here is the URL: http://bit.ly/osvimeetup, courtesy of @lkilpatrick. You can enter as a Guest on 7PM (Pacific Time) for tech talks.

Here are the 8 tech talks we pulled together. A bit long but  Read more...