Blogs: VMware

If you’re participating in our beta program for the Splunk App for VMware, and are upgrading to vSphere 5 shortly, we have good news for you. We’ve released an updated beta with support for vSphere 5!

You may be wondering—what have we heard from our beta customers so far?

The first thing we hear is, “Wow, this is a lot of data!”—and it is. One of the reasons for this, is that we pull metrics data directly from the ESX hosts and with a much deeper level of granularity than is available with vCenter.

“What’s the use of this deeper level of granularity? ”, you might ask

Well—have you had that experience as a user of VMware virtual machines, where…

We took a new corporate instance of Splunk into production last fiscal year, via the efforts of Paul Stout, my manager of Splunk applications, and the team who worked with him from our IT operations and professional services departments. The facilities group just ringed the office space with monitors to display some of the key dashboards we use on a daily basis to monitor and manage our assets. We are rolling out the Splunk App for Enterprise Security 2.0 and the latest app for VMware, and these have been major developments on our road map.

Had a nice reminder of how a passion for Splunk so often starts with someone from an operations trying to solve a specific problem and…

The Splunk App for VMware is now in beta. It has been one of our most popular requests and a much-searched-for app. Why? Because virtualization, as much as it allows resources to be shared more efficiently, also leads to problems being shared! Splunk customers want to be able to tie user level or application level problems with the underlying server, storage, network or virtualization layers. They want a way to make those connections easily and at scale.

Last week, the Splunk team was at VMworld Copenhagen on a very exciting mission- Monitoring Labcloud, VMware’s private cloud environment that runs all the labs at VMworld. The Splunk team had taken on the task of providing end to end visibility across a subset of VMware’s Labcloud environment. The technology tiers that Splunk was monitoring including LabCloud(a custom app), VMware vCloud Director, VMware vSphere, VMware vCenter Server, NetApp storage and networking devices in the environment. The environment was enormously dynamic with virtual machines being spun up and spun down; host configurations changing frequently. Needless to say, Splunk performed with flying colors! Some of our key wins:

1. In a cloud environment, a lot of the provisioning and de-provisioning is delegated

…

We came across a very interesting post from Andre Leibovici that spells out a nice recipe for collecting and indexing PCoIP log files across a large network:

When you have hundreds or thousands of log files across hundreds or thousands of desktops, the task of collecting and analysing those files can be challenging if you do not have the right tool. When you need to troubleshoot PCoIP across a range of desktops you will be challenged with a similar scenario.

Read the original post here.

Read more about PCoIP here.

Hi Everyone – Thanks for the zillion emails expressing interest in trying out the beta of the Splunk app for VMware. I have added everyone who emailed me to a beta list. I would say we are still about a couple of weeks away from releasing the beta. In the meanwhile, a couple of our pioneering customers, who are already doing their own saved searches and using Splunk to resolve issues in virtualized environments are presenting at VMworld and need your help! The session is “Issue Resolution with Pinpoint Precision”..please vote for it here

http://vmworld.com/community/conferences/2010/cfpvote/pcmanagment

Voting ends Friday – so be sure to vote today!

I hope a lot of you are going to VMworld, Splunk will definitely be there…

Greetings from Minneapolis. Back due to popular demand, we’re here for our second SplunkLive in this city. Highlights of this event included a presentation from Splunk customer Carlson Wagonlit Travel and a presentation on Splunk for VMware – since a large percentage of attendees have complex environments with both physical and virtual servers.

Carlson Wagonlit Travel

Dan Zellmer, Senior Director Mid-Office Automation at Carlson Wagonlit Travel (CWT), shared his experience using Splunk for managing their AQUA application environment. CWT is a global leader specializing in business travel management.

AQUA is the project name for the Mid-office automation system used by branches worldwide for quality control, ticketing, fare checks, unused ticketing checks, seat assignments, and itinerary delivery.…

Have you ever received a call from one of your users saying, “My application is running too slow – I want a real server, not a virtual one?” or how about a call saying, “All my virtual machines just got powered off! “. As the administrator for your VMware environment, your job is a tough one. You know your environment is really stable and VMware is saving you lots of cash … and yet, your users tend to turn around and blame virtualization for their problems. Some of these problems are real and many of them imaginary. Wouldn’t it be great to know about problems in your hypervisor before they happen? How about reporting on historical data so people have…

On a crisp and wet Wednesday morning, the W hotel played host to SplunkLive Atlanta 2010. 100 attendees packed the well-heeled conference room, all eager to learn more about Splunk, get burning questions answered and connect with peers.

As with other SplunkLive events, we invited customer speakers to share their experiences with Splunk. On this occasion we had three speakers and every one of them was stellar.

John Daniely – Atlanta Journal Constitution

The first speaker was John Daniely, from Atlanta Journal Constitution, the only major daily in Atlanta and somewhat of an institution enjoying a daily readership of 2.3 million visitors.

John and his team are responsible for all aspects of network security, including Active Directory auditing, security…

I stumbled upon this unexpected post from Chad Sakac of EMC talking about the VMware/EMC/Cisco collaboration.

For anyone who has spent their career on the start-up track in Silicon Valley this is not a novel story.

Isn’t it fantastic to see some large companies still have the mojo of entrepreneurship and fast moving initiatives that survive outside of the normal organizational structure?

While it remains to be seen how successful VCE, Acadia and Vblock will be, it sure is exciting to have the industry talking about radically new approaches to simplify computing! Here is a great post summarizing Vblock from Mark Bowker @ Enterprise Strategy Group. Now if we can only get access to that…