VMWare

[tugrik]

Any VMWare gurus out there?

Can you recommend one or more good VMWare training books? Especially ones that deal with the networking end, and things like how best to mesh with Cisco switching infrastructures?

I need to buy some training manuals, stat. There are so many out there I'd love a recommendation on which ones are good to get.

Comments

[inaki.livejournal.com]

We use VMware pretty heavily at work. I'll ask my boss if he has any suggestions!

[frysco.livejournal.com]

Any VMWare gurus out there?

How can there not be, considering how many furries work for VMWare these days? :>

[coyoteseven.livejournal.com]

Seriously?

[tugrik.livejournal.com]

Very much so.

Remember, most 'furries' grew up in a virtual world... so it's only natural to have a virtual career. It works out quite well!

[tugrik.livejournal.com]

Why do you think I asked on my friendslist? :)

[strredwolf.livejournal.com]

VMWare *BOOKS?!?*

*quick-searches... and there are!*

Okay, I have no recommendations. The networking end, however, I can tackle with this: If you want to give your VM's an IP address on the local network, you're using bridged networking, and you're sharing a real Ethernet connection among your VM's on the VM server. So you'll have only one port to connect to, unless you want to bridge multiple GigE ports together to the Cisco router.

[coppercheetah.livejournal.com]

I will not call myself a guru, but I would recommend speaking to Shane Raney on VMWare issues. He's got the experience I don't have as of yet.

I wish I could recommend a book on the networking side of things--It's largely going to depend on how you're getting network traffic out of the server(s), since clustering of hardware for a VM infrastructure adds considerable complexity for when the VM's traffic has to run around the network.

[ruwhei.livejournal.com]

I'm a Cisco person, and deal with VMware at work. You've probably found out by now that the networking part of VM is usually a mystery to the server folks. :)

For the most part there is not a tremendous amount of stuff to be really concerned about at the moment. You can trunk a port over to a VM box so that the VM box can have guests on different VLANs. Or, you can simply assign it a regular vlan, which means all guests on the VMhost need to be on that same vlan.

VM does have options such as NAT and bridging that are *usually* not used in an enterprise environment, because in general you like to have 'real' IP addresses that network people can see and troubleshoot, and not a NAT'd address hiding behind something a server administrator controls.

In the near future, things are going to become more complex. Cisco is getting its claws into the actual switching environment of VMWare (This is not really new, VMware and Cisco have been in a partnership for some time. What's going to happen is Cisco is going to create a 'virtual switch' within a VMhost, so that a network administrator can log into it and control it just as if it was a real physical cisco switch. You would then have virtual ports, that you can assign to the virtual hosts, and muck around with all the switching options that Cisco is known for and that you might want to push down to those particular hosts.

As for a particular book, I am not aware of any books that are cisco oriented, or rather, "VMware for the Networking Professional". I can and should look around, and I have some resources I can check with to see if they have any recommendations. Most VMware information is heavy on the server (guest/host) side, with networking being a small afterthought.

Was there anything you were particulary trying to accomplish or were you just looking for generic knowledge sort of stuff to strengthen the environment? Are you also the VMware administrator or are you purely network?