July 6, 2010 - VMtoday

I’ve held off on posting this as I don’t like to toot my own vuvuzela too loudly, but in a fit of shameless self promotion and a desire to see the program grow, here goes nothin:

I am a VMware vExpert!

VMware notifed recipients of the designation last month. The 300 or so awardees are recognized for their “advocacy of VMware solutions, your contributions to the community of VMware users, and your willingness to share your expertise with others.” I find it an absolute honor to be included amongst the vExpert class of 2010 – a group full of folks who are on the cutting edge of virtualization and cloud computing, many of whom have helped me through their books, blogs, and contributions to the VMware Community. Arnim van Lieshout has compiled a nice list of vExperts here: https://www.van-lieshout.com/vexpert-2010/.

It’s an exciting time to be a virtualization professional – in terms of the technology, people and seemingly endless opportunities. I look forward to continuing my contributions to the community through this here blog, my leadership of the Washington, DC Metro Area VMware User Group, and through my work as a implementer of VMware solutions! Special thanks to John Troyer for sponsoring the program and doing so much to organize the VMware community through the weekly VMware Community Roundtable, Social Media and the many other programs he touches.

I upgraded my in-house VMware vSphere environment to 4.0 Update 2 last week. After upgrading my vSphere Client to the Update 2 version I was greeted with a series of 7 ugly error messages stating: Method not found: ‘VMware.CustomControls.LabelEx VpxClient.Common.Util.Helper.AddLabel(System.Windows.Froms.Control,Int32, int32, System.String, System.Drawing.FontStyle, Boolean)”.I assumed a plug-in had caused the error message. I started my troubleshooting by disabling the 3rd-party plug-ins in the environment, beginning with the free EMC Storage Viewer. Upon disabling the EMC Storage Viewer 2.x plug-in the problem was resolved. I went out to EMC PowerLink to see if an update was available for the plug-in and was surprised to find that I had missed a major update/rebranding of the plug-in. EMC now calls the plug-in the ‘EMC Virtual Storage Integrator’. A hotfix was released on July 2nd to bring Update 2 support to the plug-in (version 3.0.0.32).

I updated the Solution Enabler installation (I installed Solution Enabler on my vCenter server, but it is also available as a SUSE based virtual appliance), and then updated the plug-in.

The update appeared to install without any problems. The vSphere Client launched like a champ after the update – no errors, but no EMC Storage plug-in either. Odd. The problem occurred on both my vCenter Server’s vSphere client and my workstation, so seems to be more than an isolated issue.

I did an uninstall of the plug-in using Add/Remove Programs, and then reinstalled it. After the reinstall the EMC Storage plug-in icon appeared in my vSphere Client as pictured below.

The EMC Virtual Storage Integrator (VSI) plug-in is free – installing it is a no-brainer for anyone running Clariion or Celerra storage arrays. The VSI simplifies the job of mapping vSphere Datastores to LUN’s and NFS shares on your EMC storage, and helps pinpoint the location of VM’s and RDM’s on your array. This visibility for the VMware administrator into the storage layer can go a long way in helping troubleshoot storage performance issues and simplifying communication between server, storage, and virtulization teams.

EMC actually offers three different free vSphere plug-ins, including the VSI. The EMC Unified Block plug-in and the EMC Unified NAS plug-in round out the trio. EMC’s Virtual Geek, Chad Sakac, covers all three in his blog post here: https://virtualgeek.typepad.com/virtual_geek/2010/06/update-on-emc-vsphere-plugins.html.