I was recently contacted by Tek-Tools and asked to checkout their Virtual Profiler management software for VMware vSphere. I admit, I hadn’t heard of Tek-Tools before but found out that they were owned by Solarwinds, an Austin, Texas company (my home state) so I thought that I would take a extra minute to check them out. As it turns out, their Virtual Profiler (vProfiler) application is part of a larger package of Profiler apps that manage and monitor things like storage, applications, physical servers, and backups. Still, you can use vProfiler on its own. I downloaded the 30 day trial of vProfiler and found it very easy to install. In the video below, I show you what vProfiler manages, monitors, and alerts on and how it can help you to manage your virtual infrastructure.

To try out vProfiler for yourself, visit the Tek-Tools vProfiler 30 day eval webpage.

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This week, I was the guest on a new weekly virtualization podcast called This Week in Virtualization. In this episode, we talked about the next version of vSphere and its features – to be released at an unspecified date. You can watch on a webpage or you can subscribe to an iTunes RSS feed and watch in iTunes or on your iPod, iPhone, or Apple TV. Click on the video below to bring up the webpage to watch:

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Here is a video detailing my home VMware vSphere lab including servers and storage…

Note: I forgot to mention in the video, the Intel Quad Q6600 shown in the video DOES run vSphere 4 as well so it is a compatible whitebox. It uses the MSI7450 BIOS.

Feel free to embed this video in your blog! You can get the code to do that by pressing the embed button on the video!

For more information on home labs and whitebox servers, listen to the VMware community roundtable episode that covers this topic.

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I just released a new video to add to my vSphere video training course. This video covers VMware’s GO – a free product that provides SMBs the ability to download ESXi, install it, configure it, create new VMs, perform P2V, download VMs, and manage ESXi servers and VMs once up and running. GO is completely web-based, once you have watched my video, you can try out VMware GO for yourself!

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Chad Sakac of EMC posted a very detailed post over at his blog covering EMC’s Avamar 5 and how it uses the VMware vStorage APIs for Data Protection. I love the detail of his post and the video is great too.

I have embedded the video below and I encourage you to read the full blog post over at: Virtual Geek — vStorage APIs for Data Protection and Avamar 5

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