This session will cover recommendations for using VMware vSphere High Availability (vSphere HA) to create a resilient software defined data center. We will start with an update on recent enhancements to vSphere HA. From there, we will move on to the recommendations for networking, storage, heartbeat datastores, isolation response, and admission control. Additional topics include: vSphere HA advanced settings, VM guest OS monitoring, options for protecting applications, and vSphere HA in Auto Deploy and Metro Cluster environments. The session will conclude with a sneak peak at the future of vSphere HA. View in Content Catalog

While the VMware vSphere® Distributed Switch has been around since vSphere 4, vSphere 4.1 and 5.0 have added a number of enhancements. This session will provide a technical deep dive into the vSphere Distributed Switch, including design and deployment considerations, configuration, migration steps, tuning and troubleshooting. Special attention will be paid to migrating an existing production environment from the standard vSwitch to the vSphere Distributed Switch with little or no disruption. Extended features such as network I/O control, network resource pools, and load-based teaming will be discussed in depth, with use cases and recommendations given. Finally, methods and tools for troubleshooting network connectivity and performance problems will also be highlighted. A live lab environment will be included, making for a very interactive session. View in Content Catalog

Storage industry experts will discuss a number of best practices for connecting vSphere 5 to SAN & NAS storage platforms with a focus on performance, availability and manageability. View in Content Catalog

This session will discuss the various design considerations when architecting the foundation for every solid cloud environment: VMware vSphere® 5.0. We will start with sizing and scaling and end with some operational guidance. Different examples will be used to show the impact design considerations can have on the availability of your services. View in Content Catalog

In this GSS Customer Support Day session attendees will be given an overview of the most common performance problems in vSphere environments today. View in Content Catalog

ware DRS is one of the flagship features of VMware vSphere that provides efficient and zero-touch management of resources in virtual environments. It helps users with the automatic initial placement and load-balancing of VMs on ESX hosts based on VM demands and host capacities while respecting user-specified constraints and resource controls. In this session, Aashish Parikh and Ajay Gulati from the DRS engineering team will present an insider's view of key concepts, specific use cases and advanced options. Learn about important resource pool recipes and become a power-user; keep your VMs happy by discovering the importance of VM resource entitlements; learn to avoid common pitfalls and effectively load-balance your clusters with new, advanced features and more. Finally, this session will give you a sneak peek into DRS labs to check out some bleeding-edge features under consideration that add new functionality and address customer pain-points. Have your say in future product development by providing feedback! View in Content Catalog

In this session Frank Denneman and Rawlinson Rivera will cover and explain in great detail what to consider when using resource pool inside a VMware vSphere® cluster. Introducing the concept of resource pools can affect virtual machine performance and overall resource management in virtual infrastructures. Join Frank and Rawlinson and discover both common pitfalls and best practices of resource pool design. This session is a must for anyone implementing resource pools who wants to maximize their cluster and vSphere resource designs. View in Content Catalog

With a VMware vSphere® implementation in several sites across four countries and three continents, Christie was well underway with its virtualization journey. The company had selected NetApp as its storage solution and had successfully grown the infrastructure to over 500 virtual machines, with many more planned for upcoming projects. However, as the numbers of virtual machines grew in the main office in Canada, strange errors started to appear. At first they were rare and very intermittent, but then began to grown at an alarming rate of frequency and intensity. Disk latencies skyrocketed to thousands of milliseconds, multiple applications unexpectedly failed over to recovery sites or crashed altogether, in-process transactions were lost, and the stability of both the storage and vSphere was called into question. Several projects were temporarily suspended until the storage issues could be resolved, including the VMware vCenter™ Site Recovery Manager™ implementation and storage-array virtual machine backup projects. Tracking down the problem, however, proved to be difficult. Initial troubleshooting efforts were unsuccessful in pinpointing the issue, and even falsely flagged some of the symptoms as being the root problem. Leveraging expertise from NetApp, and using different packages from third-party software venders, we gradually identified and correct issues. Every issue we identified and rectified gave us further insight into addressing the remaining issues. In the end, we discovered that it was no one of the several "suboptimal" configurations that were responsible for the performance issues but rather their collective influence, which placed significant stress on the storage subsystem. View in Content Catalog

In the past, challenges such as up-front infrastructure acquisition costs, especially cost of shared storage, and management complexity have limited the adoption of an enterprise-wide VDI strategy. Help is on it's way. In this session, we will first review what's new in the latest VMware View 5.1 release including the numerous storage performance optimization features and large scale deployment enhancement tools to help enhance the TCO of VDI. We will then drill down to review upcoming storage solutions particularly useful in enhancing the performance of VDI while drastically reduce the infrastructure cost. By learning what's new and what's next in View, customers and partners are provided with the information and confidence they need to continue to expand the adoption of VDI. View in Content Catalog

Back for a second year, vExpert Greg Shields updates his top-rated, standing-room-only, save-your-kiester HA and DRS session for 2012. This one's not to miss. Everyone thinks HA and DRS are awesome technologies. But make a mistake in configuring either, and they'll crash your virtual infrastructure faster than you ever imagined. In his consulting travels, Greg has collected 19 of the biggest HA and DRS mistakes that'll kill your datacenter. Join him and discover how your VMware vSphere® cluster might be dangerously misconfigured and where exactly to adjust its settings for guaranteed protection. Join Greg and justify your VMworld attendance in just a single session. You’ll get the immediately-useable HA and DRS guidance that’ll have you remoting your systems from here to verify Greg’s mistakes aren’t also yours. View in Content Catalog