Posted by Steve Herrod Chief Technology Officer In August, I published a blog post explaining our acquisition of SpringSource, the popular open source Java development framework focused on simplifying the task of application development. Furthermore, we liked how SpringSource targets this application development simplicity for both on-premise and cloud deployment targets. Today I’m pleased to announce that we have entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Zimbra from Yahoo. While Zimbra’s domain is different than that of SpringSource, there are several commonalities in the…
Virtualization
- The Console
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VMware to acquire Zimbra
12 Jan 2010 | 1:06 pm -
Where Did the “Boxes” Go?
12 Nov 2009 | 2:50 pmPosted by Rick Jackson Chief Marketing Officer At VMworld 2009 this past September, we rolled out an updated VMware logo as a predecessor to our overall re-branding efforts. The obvious change that most people saw and commented on was the absence of the “bug” – that part of the logo that is not our company name. I.e., “Where did the boxes go?” The original VMware logo that contained the boxes, formally referred to as the rings, first appeared in 1999, and symbolized multiple virtual machines. It was simple, and yet incredibly descriptive. The concept of… -
Brand – Holistic and Consistent
10 Nov 2009 | 6:47 pmPosted by Rick Jackson Chief Marketing Officer VMware has now passed the decade mark, and created what is arguably one of the most important brands in software. In this case, I am simply referring to the name of our company as the brand. It is incredible how well recognized we are amongst our primary target buyer – the IT audience. As we look forward to what we want to accomplish in the next decade, we decided that it was time to pump up the whole essence of the VMware brand. And in this case, I am referring to the brand identity – the collection of attributes… -
Energize and Save – Standing Out in a Crowd
8 Nov 2009 | 10:07 pmPosted by Rick Jackson Chief Marketing Officer When a company grows as rapidly as VMware has, you know there is real value being delivered to customers. One of the challenges we faced at VMware was how best to articulate our core value proposition, when there were just so many great things to talk about. This was a classic exercise in defining the Point That Matters, the core reason why your customers buy from you. (The Point That Matters is a phrase I borrow from Zoom Marketing, our trusted partner during this process.) This exercise was a combination of examining our… -
VMware, HP’s Converged Infrastructure, and the Private Cloud
5 Nov 2009 | 10:01 amPosted by Steve Herrod Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of R&D This week HP introduced their Converged Infrastructure Architecture, which is appropriately described as “a blueprint for chief information officers to create elasticity in their technology environments.” This blueprint unlocks currently siloed datacenter resources (including compute, storage and network components) and, with the help of virtualization, integrates them into a pool of very fluid resources that can be smartly and safely allocated to the applications running on top. Put another way, HP has…
- vSphere PowerCLI Blog
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At Partner Exchange next week? Unlock the secrets of the vSphere API with “Project Onyx”!
5 Feb 2010 | 12:11 pmIf you’re at VMware Partner Exchange next week be sure to come see me at my session, TEXIBP1007 – also known as “Getting Stoned with ‘Project Onyx’” on Thursday at 11:30. If you haven’t seen it, Onyx is a tool that converts vSphere Client UI clicks into executable code, which means that instead of writing your code the hard way you just use a tool you know and love to automatically generate your code. If you can’t wait to get started you can download Onyx or visit our community. Since it’s Partner Exchange, for one day only I’ll be wearing my developer’s hat and showing… -
Your best PowerCLI script could win you $2,500 cash!
5 Feb 2010 | 11:39 amIn case you missed it, VMware is running a Script-O-Mania contest to find the world’s very best ESXi management scripts. One point that might be worth clarifying, it doesn’t have to manage just ESXi, so if it works with ESX and ESXi that’s ok. So dust off those old PowerCLI and get submitting! Hurry, contest ends March 15th, 2010! Full details are available at http://vmware.com/go/scriptomania -
5 PowerCLI how-to videos for your viewing pleasure.
2 Feb 2010 | 11:27 pmIt’s been a while since I updated so I thought I’d mention a few videos I made a while back that give some useful tips in using PowerCLI 4.0 U1. Video 1: Using multiple sessions with PowerCLI 4.0 U1. This first video shows a few tips for dealing with multiple sessions with U1. With U1 you can connect to multiple vCenters or multiple ESXes or even some vCenter and some ESXes and apply your commands across everything. There’s a lot of possible uses here but Glenn Sizemore pointed out an interesting use where if his vCenter ever goes offline he’s not sure where it is (Glenn… -
Troubleshooting: Slow startup with PowerCLI 4.0 U1
4 Jan 2010 | 5:05 amA substantial portion of PowerCLI 4.0 U1 users report extremely slow startup. On affected systems PowerCLI takes very long (sometimes up to 5 minutes) to start. Standard PowerShell window opens as usual. The problem appears when a machine does not have Internet access. The cause is a security feature of Windows - checking for revocation of software publisher's certificate. The problem is not specific to PowerCLI. Other applications on the same machine which use certificates are affected as well. To avoid the delay, disable the following option:Windows > Control Panel > Internet… -
PowerCLI 4.0 U1 is out!
19 Nov 2009 | 10:18 pmTonight we released PowerCLI 4.0 U1. This release contains more than 60 new cmdlets as well as greatly improved performance, a new feature to make it easy to manage multiple ESX or vCenter servers from a single window and much, much more. We’ve also put our cmdlet reference online. Watch this space over the next few days for demo videos but in the meantime don’t forget to download and give it a try.
- VMware Networking Blog
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F5 Accelerates Long Distance vMotion
8 Feb 2010 | 9:58 pmAt VMworld last year, F5 previewed and demonstrated their Long Distance vMotion solution. Since then, F5 has worked on integrating the solution into their BIG-IP product and leverage their new WAN Optimization Module (WOM). What does this mean for VMware customers? vMotion over distance on a traditional WAN is constrained by bandwidth and latency. Any packet loss will further throttle throughput as TCP congestion avoidance kicks in. In short distance and bandwidth constrains how far you go and how much you can pump through the link (and how many VMs you can migrate in a unit of time). The F5… -
VMware vSphere + Cisco Nexus 1000V bundles program extended in 2010
15 Jan 2010 | 3:58 pmOk, it’s not really technical, but definitely worth a short blog post. When we released vSphere in May last year, we introduced some cut-price bundles that included the Cisco Nexus 1000V virtual switch. These ‘one stop shop’ bundles made it easier and cheaper for customers to adopt the Nexus 1000V as their virtual networking solution. Last week we announced we’re continuing the bundle program. For more information, talk with your VMware account manager or reseller. And, don’t forget … Release 1.2 of the Nexus 1000V is released and available. I wrote about it back on December 18. -
VMXNET3 vs. VMXNET2 Performance Shootout
15 Jan 2010 | 3:09 pmWith vSphere 4, we introduced a new paravirtualized adapter—VMXNET3. This was designed from the ground up for high performance and supports a bunch of new features. So how does it perform? One of our engineers pitched it against the previous generation—VMXNET2. VMXNET3 not only performs better (greater throughput on transmit and receive), but consumes less CPU. These results were most significant with a 10GigE NIC on Windows (Windows Server 2008 Enterprise). The results for IPv4 and IPv6 are shown in the graph below. Windows 10GigE throughput… -
Demystifying HP Flex-10 network mappings with vSphere
7 Jan 2010 | 6:00 pmConfession: I haven’t had any first hand experience with the HP Flex-10 modules. However, I know from talking with a number of customers that there are a lot of them out there. Kenneth Van Ditmarsch has written a fabulous blog article with the all important diagrams that depict the Flex-10 to vmnic mappings. If you’re stumped on how this stuff hangs together, then this should help you out. -
Cisco Nexus 1000V R1.2 for vSphere 4 Released
18 Dec 2009 | 2:59 pmJust on a week ago, Cisco released the Nexus 1000V R1.2 virtual switch for vSphere 4. This introduced a bunch of new features mainly around setup/installation and security. The full list of new features are as follows: GUI setup following software install Layer 3 control between VSM and VEMs Virtual Service Domains for classifying and separating traffic for network services iSCSI Multipath—supporting multipath feature introduced in vSphere 4 XML API for developing client apps for managing/monitoring the Nexus 1000V DHCP Snooping for validating DHCP messages and filtering invalid responses…
- VMware Security Blog
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vShield Zones Reviewer's Guide available
3 Feb 2010 | 4:20 pmWe recently published the VMware vShield Zones Reviewer's Guide. The purpose of this document is to support a self-guided, hands-on evaluation of VMware™ vShield Zones. This document is intended to provide IT professionals with the necessary information to learn the capabilities of vShield Zones and see how they can be used in practical situations.The content includes a product overview, brief installation instructions, and a walk-through of a scenario that shows the main features of vShield Zones in action.You can download the guide from here. -
Announcing vSphere 4.0 Hardening Guide Public Draft Release
25 Jan 2010 | 1:25 pmVMware would like to announce the availability of a public draft for the vSphere 4.0 Security Hardening Guide. This guide represents a new approach to providing security guidance from VMware. As compared with the previous VI3 Hardening Guides, the current guide has the following highlights Structure: this version uses a standardized format, with formally defined sections, templates, and reference codes. The goal is to increase clarity and reduce ambiguity, make it easier to reference individual guidelines, and most of all, enhance the ability to automate guideline… -
The Common Vulnerability Scoring System and VMware network isolation
6 Oct 2009 | 2:44 pmThe Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) is an standard for assessing the severity of computer system security vulnerabilities. CVSS is composed of three metric groups: Base, Temporal, and Environmental, each consisting of a set of metrics. For those not familiar with CVSS, here is a blog post Common Vulnerability Scoring System (CVSS) Explained. Base: represents the intrinsic and fundamental characteristics of a vulnerability that are constant over time and user environments. Temporal: represents the characteristics of a vulnerability that change over time but not among user… -
Come visit us at SANS Network Security 2009
15 Sep 2009 | 4:38 pmA small contingent of VMware folks will be staffing a booth at the SANS Network Security 2009 event in San Diego on September 17 and 18. Stop by and chat if you want to learn more about virtualization networking, security, and compliance, including what's new in vSphere 4 such as the vNetwork Distributed Switch and vShield Zones. -
Visit our VMworld talk on the Secure Software Development Life Cycle at VMware
27 Aug 2009 | 11:17 amIf you are at VMworld next week and you are interested what we are doing to make our products more secure, come to our talk on VMware’s Secure Software Development Life Cycle (follow link, click "Content Catalog" and search on "secure"). The first part of the talk will spell out our security training, architectural reviews, security testing, code analysis, and the Product Security Policy. The second part of the talk will feature the security response activities and take you through a real-world disclosure scenario. We hope to see you in room 301 at 2.30 pm on Tuesday…
- VROOM!
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SAP Batch Job Performance on vSphere
5 Feb 2010 | 10:44 amAn included part of every SAP system is the SGEN transaction that is used to recompile all the objects in the system after every system update. This job is run by SAP Basis administrators after a fresh install or upgrade of SAP and requires users to be offline, hence the task should perform as quickly as possible to minimize downtime. SGEN has a parallel processing design that is also inherent in other SAP business batch jobs. SGEN should not be confused with the standardized and popular SAP SD benchmark that is representative of OLTP performance and is used as the basis for the standard… -
VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4.0 Performance and Best Practices White Paper Posted
5 Dec 2009 | 2:12 amVMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4.0 is a component of VMware Infrastructure that ensures a speedy and successful datacenter recoveryby automating the recovery process and eliminating the complexity of managing and testing recovery plans. A new white paper, VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager 4.0 Performance and Best Practices, is now available at http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/VMware-vCenter-SRM-WP-EN.pdf You can also find it under the technical resources section at http://www.vmware.com/products/site-recovery-manager/resource.html In this paper we discuss VMware vCenter Site… -
SAP Performance and Scalability with IBM System x3850 M2 and vSphere 4
1 Dec 2009 | 1:49 pmBack in June, I wrote about some scale-up experiments that we conducted with SAP software on vSphere 4. That work focused on a single VM, so we decided to follow it up with a study of multiple VMs on a single server. Collaborating with IBM, we performed experiments to study the scale-out behavior of SAP software: using vSphere 4 to run multiple VMs on a 24-core IBM x3850 M2. We presented this joint work at VMworld 2009 (EA 1640), and have recently written a whitepaper that contains the results:… -
Performance Study of VMware vStorage Thin Provisioning
16 Nov 2009 | 4:48 pmvStorage Thin Provisioning, a key component of VMware vSphere™, is a technology that redefines storage provisioning by allocating space on demand to the virtual disks. We recently published a paper that gives the details of this feature and discusses experiments conducted to study the performance of thin-provisioned disks in a VMware vSphere™ environment.The data we have collected reveals Both thin and thick disks perform similarly on various workloads. Thin provisioned disks show similar performance trends as thick disks do when scaled across different hosts. External fragmentation has… -
Storage performance improvements in vSphere 4.0
20 Oct 2009 | 4:17 pmWe made a huge number of performance improvements in vSphere 4.0. The ESX storage stack was no exception. We ran a wide variety of micro and real world benchmarks to thoroughly evaluate and optimize vSphere’s storage subsystem. It is now even more efficient for the enterprise and ready to support the cloud. A wide variety of I/O intensive applications will run efficiently on vSphere with all the improvements. You can find details on the architectural changes and storage performance improvements made in this white paper. Some of the noteworthy improvements are:…
- VMBLOG
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Introducing the VMware Express: a Mobile Datacenter Coming to your Town
9 Feb 2010 | 4:29 amToday VMware is proud to unveil the VMware Express during its inaugural stop at the 2010 VMware Partner Exchange in Las Vegas, NV. This state of the... Read more at VMblog.com. -
UShareSoft Introduces UForge Appliance Factory, a NEW On-Demand Application Delivery Platform to the Cloud
9 Feb 2010 | 4:25 amUShareSoft today launched two new products "UForge Appliance Factory" , allowing IT professions to easily assemble software appliances; and "Open... Read more at VMblog.com. -
INX Announces VMware Book Release at 2010 VMware Partner Exchange in Las Vegas
9 Feb 2010 | 4:18 amINX Inc., announced today that INX's Steve Kaplan, in conjunction with VMware's Duncan Epping and lead author, John Arrasjid, have coauthored... Read more at VMblog.com. -
Xsigo Partners With CTC and Hitachi for I/O Virtualization
9 Feb 2010 | 4:10 amXsigo Systems , a technology leader in data center I/O virtualization , today announced that Xsigo Systems Japan partnered with Itochu... Read more at VMblog.com. -
Exar Corporation Signs Definitive Agreement to Acquire Neterion, Inc.
9 Feb 2010 | 3:37 amExar Corporation and Neterion , Inc., announced today that they have signed a definitive agreement under which Exar will acquire Neterion – a... Read more at VMblog.com.
- Virtualization.com
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Xsigo Teams Up With Hitachi, CTC for I/O Virtualization
8 Feb 2010 | 2:26 pmXsigo Systems today announced that Xsigo Systems Japan partnered with Itochu Techno-Solutions Corporation (CTC) and Hitachi to jointly offer I/O virtualization solutions to the Japanese market. The companies offer immediate availability of a jointly developed solution that will allow enterprise customers to rapidly implement cloud computing environments. The combined solution includes Hitachi... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]] -
DynamicOps Launches Automated Virtual Desktop Solution
8 Feb 2010 | 11:59 amDynamicOps today announced that it has enhanced its Virtual Resource Manager (VRM) software with NetApp® FlexClone technology, creating a fully-automated virtual desktop solution that significantly reduces desktop provisioning times and associated storage costs. This new version of VRM is combined with a specialized NetApp module that leverages and orchestrates the FlexClone technology of NetApp... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]] -
China VoIP & Digital Telecom Subsidiary Signs Virtualization Agreement with Shandong University of Finance
8 Feb 2010 | 11:54 amJinan Yinquan Technology , one of the wholly-owned subsidiaries of China VoIP & Digital Telecom, today announced that it has launched its integrated datacenter and desktop virtualization solutions in Shandong University of Finance (the SDUF), a well-known finance university in Shandong Province. Desktop virtualization separates a personal desktop computer from the physical machine through a... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]] -
Virtustream Executives Earn VMware VCDX Certification
8 Feb 2010 | 11:53 amVirtustream today announced that two senior executives have earned the coveted VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) certification. Sean Jennings, vice president, managed services and Matt Theurer, vice president, professional services were two of the first five technology professionals welcomed into the elite group of architects leading virtualization implementations around the world. [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]] -
VMware Partner Exchange 2010 Kicks Off: 2,600+ Attendees and 55 Sponsors
8 Feb 2010 | 11:49 amVMware today kicked off VMware Partner Exchange 2010, the company's third annual global partner conference. This year's event comes on the heels of a successful 2009, during which VMware experienced steady growth in the VMware Partner Network and continued investment in programs such as solution competencies, VMware Partner University, and certification training -- helping partners deliver... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]
- News
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Oracle Beefs Up SOA with AmberPoint Deal
8 Feb 2010 | 11:23 amOracle today said it has agreed to acquire AmberPoint, a supplier of software for managing service-oriented architectures, for an undisclosed sum. -
FAST Search Will Be a Windows-Only Product
5 Feb 2010 | 5:39 pmMicrosoft plans to eventually discontinue offering its standalone versions of FAST enterprise search products for Linux and Unix. -
Microsoft, NSF Open Azure to Researchers
5 Feb 2010 | 11:35 amAcademic researchers can now apply for free access to Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud services. -
iPad Impacts .NET Developers
4 Feb 2010 | 10:37 amApple's new tablet PC was announced amid a roar of pre-release hype. What does it mean for .NET developers? -
Office 2010 Hits RC Stage
4 Feb 2010 | 10:10 amMicrosoft Office 2010 reached the release candidate milestone this week, bringing the development process one step closer to the product's planned June release.
- blog.scottlowe.org
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Partner Exchange 2010 Session TECHBC0320
9 Feb 2010 | 11:25 amThis is a liveblog for VMware Partner Exchange session TECHBC0320, “How VMware Leverages Microsoft Volume Shadow Services for Virtual Machine Snapshots”. The presenter is Paul Vasquez with VMware; he works within the Technical Alliances Organization at VMware with a focus on backups. The session starts out with an overview of VMware snapshots followed by a quick overview of Microsoft Volume Shadow Copy Services. Vasquez is careful to distinguish VMware snapshots from array-based snapshots, which is good since that seems to confuse a number of people. VMware snapshots can include… -
Moving Lab Manager Datastores
4 Feb 2010 | 1:14 pmYou might have noted a slight incompatibility between VMware vCenter Lab Manager and one of VMware vSphere’s core features, Storage VMotion, in this earlier post on VMware Lab Manager design considerations by former co-worker Aaron Delp: Storage VMotion and VMware VCB are not supported with Lab Manager. Obviously, this could present a problem for users who might need to migrate Lab Manager datastores from one LUN or array to another LUN or array. So what’s a user to do? Fortunately, an internal discussion on this earlier today turned up some great information on a utility called… -
Using IP-Based Storage with VMware vSphere on Cisco UCS
4 Feb 2010 | 6:27 amI had a reader contact me with a couple of questions, one of which I felt warranted a blog post. Paraphrased, the question was this: How do I make IP-based storage work with VMware vSphere on Cisco UCS? At first glance, you might look at this question and scoff. Remember though, that Cisco UCS does—at this time—have a few limitations that make this a bit more complicated than at first glance. Specifically: Recall that the UCS 6100XP fabric interconnects only have two kinds of ports: server ports and uplink ports. Server ports are southbound, meaning they can only connect to the… -
EMC Celerra Optimizations for VMware on NFS
31 Jan 2010 | 3:34 pmRecently Jason Boche posted some storage performance numbers from his EMC Celerra NS-120. Out of those storage performance tests, Jason noted that the NFS performance of the NS-120 seemed a bit off, so he contacted EMC’s vSpecialist team (also known as “Chad’s Army”, but I like vSpecialists better) to see if there was something that could or should be done to improve NFS performance on the NS-120. After collaborating internally, one of our team members (a great guy named Kevin Zawodzinski) responded to Jason with some suggestions. I wanted to reproduce those… -
Links for 2010-01-25 [del.icio.us]
26 Jan 2010 | 12:00 amDavMail POP/IMAP/SMTP/CalDav/LDAP Exchange Gateway DavMail is a tool that enables protocols like IMAP, SMTP, LDAP over WebDAV for compatibility with Microsoft Exchange Server.
- Gabes Virtual World
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Licensing problems with VMware VIEW4
4 Feb 2010 | 3:46 pmRecently my colleague Jon Klaus was installing VMware VIEW4 with a customer as he ran into a problem. In his setup there where two ESX hosts that each held 10 VDI VM’s and when putting one host into... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]] -
VMware vSphere 4 Implementation by Mike Laverick
21 Jan 2010 | 10:21 amVMware vSphere 4 Implementation by Mike Laverick http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/ (expected release: Mid Feb 2009) It was spring 2009 when I was asked if I was interested in doing the technical editing of... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]] -
Homelab for VCP and VCDX
19 Jan 2010 | 9:09 amIf you want to study for your VCP or VCDX exams, you really need a lab in which you can test what the study material is talking about. Hopefully you have a test environment at work that you can use,... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]] -
And the oscar goes to…..
18 Jan 2010 | 11:21 am…. Duncan Epping and his very good blog Yellow-Bricks. It wasn’t completely unexpected since Duncan’s blog is definitely the one with the best in-depth content and a very high... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]] -
Configuring SNMP monitoring for the IX4-200D and IX2-200 in SolarWinds Orion
13 Jan 2010 | 5:20 pmAs you’ve all read in previous postings, I’m the proud owner of the new Iomega IX4-200D. After stressing it for two other blog posts, I was playing some more with all the features and... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]
- Virtual Black Hole
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Important Update About vWire
12 months ago I took on a new initiative here at Tripwire focused on virtualization management. The vWire project was a separate line of business from Tripwire Enterprise, entirely focused on solutions to make the VI professional’s life easier. What a ride it has been! Over the past year I had ... -
Using PowerShell To Get Content From a File
On my quest for PowerShell knowledge I was working on a script to rescan HBA's and then to list the paths to the datastores but, I only wanted the script to run on certain specific hosts at a time. Usually the rule is when you add storage or paths to ... -
vSphere Service Console Partitioning
There is a very good blog post on the best practices for vSphere (ESX 4) Service Console Partitions by Rich Brambley on the VM /ETC blog. The original article can be found here. In this article he had a very nice chart for custom partitioning. Custom Partitioning The following Custom Partitioning Design ... -
Where to download VMware Cold Clone
I had the opportunity recently to try to help a friend on his quest to P2V a Microsoft ISA Server. We tried all sorts of different setting to allow communication between the ISA and in this case both Virtual Center and a Platespin server trying to get either one to ... -
Let’s Talk About VMware DPM
Today's topic is going to be about VMware's Distributed Power Management or otherwise known as VMware DPM. If you have not heard about VMware DPM before, I found an interesting video interview with Anne Holler who works at VMware as a Senior Staff Engineer. I found this interview at Vladan ...
- Malaysia VMware Communities
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Cisco Nexus 1000V
9 Feb 2010 | 9:43 amToday I was setting up the Nexus 1000V with Cisco UCS, and this was my 2nd time of experiencing the nexus 1000V. Previous experience when I did the 1st installation and configuration on Nexus 1000V, it take me few days to get it done, but it only took us 1 few hours to do so with a help from my colleague who are the networking expert. I was using the Nexus 1000V version 1.2 which is greatly enhance and simplify VS the version 1. There are video on the web which show you how to setup the Nexus 1000V in 8 mins video, which is greatly reliable. You can refer to the link here to find out more. -
Stateless Computing from Cisco UCS
4 Feb 2010 | 9:12 amI had been busy with the demo on Cisco UCS with VMware and EMC recently. 1 of the key features I had tested was about the Stateless Computing claim by Cisco. As a server or system guys, we all know that the ability to maintain the system state with UUID, Firmware, BIOS, LAN & SAN are important during a hardware changes. Honest speaking, the demo performed last week was my 1st experience on the stateless computing. The outcome was impressive. To enjoy the benefit of stateless computing, you must ensure that the server or system are boot from SAN. We simulated the blade failure during the… -
1st APAC Virtualization Roundtable
31 Jan 2010 | 8:14 pmTitle: EPISODE 1 – Introduction & Your Virtual Environment Start Time: Wed 03/02/10 06:00 PM (KUALA LUMPUR TIME) Duration (minutes): 60 Call ID: 75046 Click the link below http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/75046 Other Time zones: Sydney(Australia) – 9PM Perth (Australia) – 6PM Hong Kong (Hong Kong) – 6PM Kuala Lumpur (Malaysia) – 6PM Auckland (New Zealand) – 11PM Related posts:Nehalem heated up the Virtualization VMware vSphere 4 Launch in Malaysia New Virtualization Platform! Cisco Unified Computing? Tags: APAC, event, Roundtable, Virtualization -
Unified Computing System with Unified Storage
29 Jan 2010 | 9:03 amUnified had become a key word today, and what does it really meant for everyone? It is similar as the phenomenal Cloud Computing 2 years ago. We had seen the storage vendor are moving from FC SAN, ISCSI SAN, NAS to a unified storage today. What a unified storage does today are providing all the storage protocol standard in the market in a single box. Vendor such as EMC and Netapp had their Unified storage to support this today and proven to be performing and user are happy with it. Beside unified storage, we are looking forward for unified computing system for the server compute platform… -
Cisco NetApp VMware Announce First Secure Multi-Tenancy Solution
29 Jan 2010 | 8:48 amIn respond to the VCE alliance which had been gaining famous in town, NetApp had officially launched the VCN alliance yesterday to provide the 1st secure multi-tenancy solution worldwide to the potential customer. This alliance partnership are slightly different from VCE as there will not be a join venture company to sell this solution in 1 part number. They are targeting to sell this solution through the certified partner worldwide. You can have a full view about the VCN alliance details from here. Related posts:FCoE End to End Solution with Cisco Nexus 5000 and Netapp Storage Vblock and VCE…
- NTPRO.NL - Eric Sloof
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VMware vForum 2010: Videos - Photos - Interviews
9 Feb 2010 | 11:58 amToday I attended the VMware Virtualization Forum event in Nijkerk. It’s a free, interactive full day event where you could learn about virtual infrastructure from experts and industry analysts. I’ve met some good old friends and had a lot of fun. I’ve made some pictures and recorded a 15 minute video so you can get an impression of this great day. Viktor van den Berg over at the Dutch VMUG also created a real video extravaganza. Ga door met lezen van "VMware vForum 2010: Videos - Photos - Interviews" -
Gabrie van Zanten about EMC's Avamar
9 Feb 2010 | 10:58 amGabrie van Zanten about EMC's Avamar - EMC Avamar backup and recovery solutions utilize patented global data deduplication technology to identify redundant data at the source, minimizing backup data before it is sent over the LAN/WAN. With Avamar, you can achieve new levels of data reduction and enable fast, secure backup for your VMware environments, remote offices, LAN/NAS servers, and desktop/laptop systems. In the process, you’ll reduce backup time, growth of secondary storage, and network utilization. I’ve recorded an interview with Gabrie -> Ga door met lezen van "Gabrie van…
- RTFM Education
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VMware in 2010: VMware to beef up HA/FT/DR Offerings (Part Two)
9 Feb 2010 | 9:36 amCrisis? What crisis? I hope VMware will widen the scope of its storage options for its disaster recovery automation product, Site Recovery Manager (SRM), this year. At the moment SRM only works with storage array-based replication from the big storage vendors. So far, purely software-based replication of VMs from the likes of VizionCore and Veeam has [...] -
Virtual DR and VMware Site Recovery Manager (Part 1)
6 Feb 2010 | 6:27 amWhen I first became involved in virtualisation back in 2003 and 2004, people used to ask me if anyone actually used virtualisation in a product. Most of the time, their plans were to initially restrict its usage to test and development environments and disaster recovery (DR). Quite rightly, I guess, they saw these environments as [...] -
Customizing VMware Site Recovery Manager recovery plans with VMware PowerCLI scripts
4 Feb 2010 | 11:55 pmIn this quick tip, I’m going to show how you can use VMware PowerCLI scripts as part of your VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) recovery plan. This quick tip is taken from my soon-to-be-released book on VMware SRM 4.0. Read on… -
Chinwag with Mike… and Chris Dearden [Episode 01]
4 Feb 2010 | 1:44 amThis weeks chinwag is with Chris Dearden. It’s a first chinwag I’ve done – so many thanks to Chris for being my hapless guinea pig. I learnt quite a bit in the recent weeks preparing for this – which I think is subject in its own right. There are SO many competing formats, software and [...] -
The date is set for the next Northern VMUG…
3 Feb 2010 | 5:46 amRight you north of England based Virtualisation fanciers listen up, the date of the next Northern VMUG has been set for Tuesday the 13th April at the Round Foundry in Leeds. Now this is a short walk from the Leeds train station,and also has good local parking. further to this there are a number of good [...]
- SearchServerVirtualization Blog
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Oracle-Sun Q&A with Jack Kaiser
1 Feb 2010 | 8:09 amThis Q&A was supposed to be part of our This Week in Virtualization podcast on Oracle’s Sun acquisition and future virtualization plans, but we ran into some technical difficulties and weren’t able to include it. Our guest was Jack Kaiser, vice president of strategic technologies for GreenPages Technology Solutions, a virtualization solutions provider in Kittery, Maine. He’s also a member of our Server Virtualization Advisory Board. Q: Do you see a lot of Oracle or Sun virtualization products currently in your customers’ environments? A: Not really. We’ve… -
Citrix profits skyrocket; is free XenServer strategy working?
28 Jan 2010 | 7:50 amCitrix profits increased by 47% in the fourth quarter of 2009, driving profits for the year up 7% compared to 2008. Citrix attributed its record profits to an increased interest in desktop virtualization and the launch of XenDesktop 4. But its quarterly revenue grew by only 8% compared to Q4 in 2008, and revenue from product licenses and license renewals grew 4% and 6%, respectively. The really big growth came from technical services and online services, which saw revenues increase by 18% and 20%, respectively. Citrix’s press release did not mention XenServer at all. Skeptics would… -
Oracle vs. VMware feud simmering
28 Jan 2010 | 6:19 am2009 was the year of Microsoft vs. VMware. Is 2010 shaping up to be the year of Oracle vs. VMware? During yesterday’s five-hour Oracle-Sun press conference, Oracle’s chief corporate architect Edward Screven took aim at VMware: “VMware is integrated with nothing. It’s a point solution.” Of course, that’s not entirely true. VMware integrates with lots of stuff, both hardware and software, but it’s usually other vendors making that other stuff. (The Cisco Unified Computing System is a prime example.) Judging by VMware’s longstanding dominance in… -
IT manager calls on HP and Microsoft to collapse SIM, SCOM
21 Jan 2010 | 8:36 amLast week’s announcement by Microsoft and Hewlett-Packard that they had entered in to a $250 million partnership was light on specifics, but at least one IT manager has an opinion of how the two companies should focus their engineering efforts. “My biggest thing is man, just get me off of two consoles,” said Matt Lavallee, director of technology at MLS Property Information Network, Inc. in Shrewsbury, Mass. As it stands, Lavallee, who runs Microsoft Hyper-V on HP servers, relies on both HP Systems Insight Manager (SIM) for information about the physical servers themselves, and Microsoft… -
Xen 4.0 Release Candidate available
15 Jan 2010 | 12:58 pmXen.org posted the Xen 4.0 Release Candidate this week, and the new hypervisor code should be finalized by the end of next month. Xen 4.0 will feature fault tolerance and the Open Virtual Switch, among other new features. Open source virtualization expert Sander van Vugt said the Open Virtual Switch “will take networking in Xen to the next level.” “I’m convinced that this release is going to be huge,” he wrote in an email. The new release comes at a crucial point for Xen. Citrix, the company most closely associated with Xen, faces constant questions about its…
- vinternals
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Next London VMUG, Feb 25th 2010 – I’m Presenting!
26 Jan 2010 | 11:15 amYes that’s right, I was very flattered to be asked to present at the next London VMUG and just couldn’t say no to Piglet (illustrious London VMUG co-ordinator). The more people there, the more nervous I am bound to be so let’s have a massive showing and try to give me a nervous breakdown! If [...] -
ESXi 4.0 Security
18 Jan 2010 | 3:48 pmI’ve been wanting to put up a post on ESXi security for some time now, and 2 recent posts have kicked me into action – this one from Scott Lowe about setting the root password on ESX and this announcement about the vSphere blogging contest . So have your caffeinated beverages and pizzas at [...] -
Useful Linux VM Tweaks, Part 1
12 Jan 2010 | 4:53 pmI’ve called this Part 1 because as I mess around more with Linux VM’s I have no doubt there will be more posts like this one. Don’t expect anything earth shattering in them either… this is all easily obtainable info, it wouldn’t surprise me if I get comments suggesting better ways to do what I [...] -
Get Only ESXi 4 Updates in VUM 4
7 Jan 2010 | 12:21 pmOne of the (many) things that bugs me about VMware Update Manager is the fact that I can’t specify to only pull down ESXi updates. I doubt there are many large enterprises that will run both fat and thin ESX in production for any length of time, I know I wouldn’t. And sure it’s “only” [...] -
First Patches of 2010 Released – VC 4 U1 / ESXi Bug Slain!
7 Jan 2010 | 12:41 amI don’t normally post about patch releases, but this one is important because it fixes the issue described in my post Why You Shouldn’t Update vCenter If Using ESXi… Yet!. This means that after applying the patch to ESXi 4, you can go right ahead with upgrading to vCenter 4.0 Update 1 without fear of disconnected [...]
- The Virtual Troll
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Eject CD in Lab Manager cause vCenter service to stop.
13 Jan 2010 | 11:33 amAs i’ve been playing around with VMware Lab Manager recently, I ran into a not so nice problem. If I attached an ISO file to a Lab Manager virtual machine and ejected it again, it caused VMware vCenter service to die every time. Im running the newest releases: VMware vSphere 4.0 Update 1 and VMware Lab Manager 4.0.1. As there is no official fix, the below temporary workaround could be implemented. Bare in mind this is an unsupported temporary workaround. Go to your vCenter server, first stop your vcenter service and make a backup of the vpxd.cfg file located within C:\Documents and… -
Error while trying to virtualise an ESX server as a virtual machine on a physical ESX
31 Dec 2009 | 2:02 amRecently there has been numerious blogposts about how to virtualise an ESX server as a virtual machine on top off a physical ESX server hosts. This is particular useful for mainly testing purposes. Check some of these blogposts out: VMware ESX 4 can even virtualize itself by Eric Gray at www.vcritical.com: http://www.vcritical.com/2009/05/vmware-esx-4-can-even-virtualize-itself/ VMware vSphere in a box by Hany Michael at www.hypervizor.com: http://www.hypervizor.com/2009/07/vsphere-in-a-box-a-virtual-private-cloud-blueprint/… -
Quite a few updates from VMware incl. vSphere 4.0 Update 1 and View 4.0
21 Nov 2009 | 12:17 amView 4 available for download among other updates… The long awaited View 4 is available for download. The earlier version did not support vSphere 4.0 and this new version of View 4 does. It requires VMware vSphere 4.0 Update 1 which also now is available. So for all that was running View 3.1 in Proof of Concept which required VI 3.5, it would now be possible to upgrade your VMware platform with both vSphere 4.0 Update 1 – which also got released this week. So there have been quite a few updates from VMware this week: VMware vSphere 4.0 Update 1 available for both ESX and vCenter… -
My Company, BusinessMann A/S won VMware Partner of the Year 2009 award in Denmark
13 Nov 2009 | 5:32 amI attended a local party held by Arrow ECS in Copenhagen last night, and several awards were given out during the party. One award stood out to me, of course, which this blog post is about. My company was nominated in the category of VMware Partner of the Year in Denmark with 3 other of our competitors. The happy news was that BusinessMann A/S won the VMware Partner of the Year 2009 award, which makes me really proud. First of all, thanks to VMware for giving BusinessMann A/S this award and thanks to all my collogues for the hard work in 2009. Also thanks to Arrow ECS for a great party -
VMware announces VMware View 4
9 Nov 2009 | 6:09 amVMware has today announced the new VMware View 4 platform for virtualizing desktops on their own VMware vSphere platform. So yes, VMware View 4 has support for VMware vSphere 4.0. It is built and tested on the latest VMware vSphere 4.0 releases It has been a while since VMware announced the partnership with Teradici to use their PCoIP protocol within VMware View for improved user multimedia experience. This is a huge upgrade from the current RDP protocol, which VMware used in prior versions of View I have watched a few demo’s of Teradici’s PCoIP protocol and has been pretty…
- Virtualfuture.info
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vSphere cluster: max 4 ESX hosts per “location” because of HA limitations?
3 Feb 2010 | 1:48 amNot a lot of info is found when you Google for manually selecting/fixing the primary HA nodes in a VMware VI or vSphere environment. Of course Duncan Epping has a couple of extremely interesting posts on Yellow-Bricks.com concerning HA even when it comes down to selecting or promoting the HA status of ESX nodes (a must [...] -
VMware View and ThinApp Integration Guide
25 Jan 2010 | 11:17 amAaron Black from VMware posted a VMware View and ThinApp Integration Guide on his blog. “The guide discusses several of the topics covered in the previous posts but brings it all together with some task based scenarios that walk you through initial setup and configuration with screenshots and sample scripts.” The guide should give answer to the [...] -
vSphere bug can bring down entire cluster (not fixed in Update1).
22 Jan 2010 | 5:44 amLast month I was on-site at one of my customers and experienced a major problem on the vSphere environment. We suddenly experienced about 150 virtual servers running on 16 hosts in 2 clusters (on the same SAN) going in jabber-mode. They froze, which made them unavailable for pings and other traffic. The freeze moment varied from 1 to [...] -
Application virtualization community at Appvirtguru.com
11 Jan 2010 | 12:39 pmLast month the well-known community forum softgridguru.com moved to the new Appvirtguru.com site. Here is the note Ruben Spruijt left behind on softgridguru.com: After 20 years it’s time for some changes. We want to inform you about the fact that the softgridguru.com content is moved to www.appvirtguru.com. The goal of Appvirtguru.com is to provide deep technical information about Application Virtualization [...] -
Time to vote for your favorite bloggers
4 Jan 2010 | 11:24 amFirst of all: Happy new year and I wish you all a fantastic 2010! In this first post of the year on Virtualfuture, I want to bring the latest survey of Eric Siebert’s top 25 “VMware and virtualization bloggers” to your attention. Currently Virtualfuture.info is ranked at number 17, which I’m very proud of. I’m [...]
- VirtualizationAdmin Blogs
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Inner Workings of VMware PC-over-IP
31 Jan 2010 | 10:15 amVMware View 4 includes PC-over-IP functionality. PC-over-IP is a display protocol licensed from Teradici. There are 2 types of PC-over-IP - hardware and software. VMware View 4 includes the software version. Some details of the inner workings of the software version of PC-over-IP are explained in a recent article by Eric Siebert. VMware's software implementation of PCoIP uses Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) and User Datagram Protocol (UDP) over port 50002. more... -
Performance comparisons of FC, iSCSI, and NFS for VMware vSphere
31 Jan 2010 | 8:54 amWhich protocol produces the best performance for vSphere? That is a question NetApp recently published a whitepaper about. The paper compares the performance of FC, iSCSI, and NFS connected storage along with the gains made in protocol optimization with vSphere as compared to VI3. Some interesting information from the report states "...there is very little difference between the performance results of any storage protocol when running VMware on NetApp. more... -
Microsoft System Center Essentials 2010 Integrates Virtualization Capabilities
31 Jan 2010 | 8:38 amMicrosoft is enabling virtualization functionality in System Center Essentials (SCE) 2010. The release candidate of SCE will include System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) for up to 50 servers and 500 clients. Alessandro Perilli explains a little more in a recent article at virtualization.info. more... -
Managing your Hyper-V server remotely
31 Jan 2010 | 12:35 amWant to manage a Hyper-V server remotely? Perhaps you want to manage your Hyper-V servers from your desktop PC... To do this, you need to install Microsoft's Hyper-V remote MMC. You can find all the instructions to download this MMC and get it installed at: TechNet - Install and Configure Hyper-V Tools for Remote Administrators. more... -
VMware publishes vShpere 4.0 Hardening Guide
30 Jan 2010 | 4:03 pmVMware has released public drafts of the vSphere 4.0 Security Hardening Guides. This set of documents provides guidance on how to securely deploy vSphere 4.0 in a production environment. more...
- Blogs
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No VMware Tools Support? Reservations, Please.
2 Feb 2010 | 3:20 pmIt's the odd system that can't support VMware tools, so this solution should only be a last resort. -
Thin-Provisioning: Virtualization or Storage System?
27 Jan 2010 | 4:30 pmTurn to one or the other, but don't use both or you might even be making things worse. -
VMware Tools Perfmon Integration
25 Jan 2010 | 3:50 pmWhere did Perfmon go? -
Virtualized I/O Can Now Include Local Storage
21 Jan 2010 | 3:14 pmWhat I've learned using Virtensys' virtualized I/O solution. -
Distributed Virtual Switch Reconfiguration Notes
19 Jan 2010 | 5:04 pmSomething for my fat-fingered friends working with vSphere.
- VIRTUALIZATION PRO
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Special Announcement: Mike Laverick joins SearchVMware.com
22 Jan 2010 | 7:45 amSpecial Announcement: Mike Laverick, owner and operator of RTFM Education, has joined SearchVMware.com as Instructor, Blogger and Author. Expect to see Laverick’s work published at SearchVMware.com on a frequent basis. Mike Laverick is a professional instructor with 15 years experience in technologies such as Novell, Windows and Citrix, and he has been involved with the VMware community since 2003. Laverick is a VMware forum moderator and member of the London VMware User Group Steering Committee. Laverick publishes free guides and utilities aimed at VMware ESX users at the… -
The Law of Unintended Consequences and SiteSurvey 2.0
11 Jan 2010 | 7:33 amPerhaps you have heard of “The Law of Unintended Consequences.” Though it isn’t an actual law of science, such as the First and Second Laws of Thermodynamics, it is a phenomenon that we all have no doubt experienced, sometimes daily. The Law of Unintended Consequences explains that in any endeavor, actions will have unanticipated results. These results can fall into the categories of positive, neutral or negative (with the negative usually attracting the biggest spotlight, and the subsequent blame). Today, for example, I encountered this law, but in the all-too-rare,… -
Holiday gift ideas for VMware administrators
14 Dec 2009 | 2:47 pmIt’s the holiday season again and last year I wrote about stocking stuffer ideas for VMware administrators, so I thought I would do the same this year. Do you need some ideas on what to get a dedicated hardworking VMware administrator for Christmas? Well here’s a few: Books: Of course I’d love it if you got them my book but there are some other great books out there that they would appreciate also: Mastering vSphere by Scott Lowe VMware vSphere and Virtual Infrastructure Security: Securing the Virtual Environment by Edward Haletky VMware vSphere 4 Administration Instant… -
What is Changed Block Tracking in vSphere?
2 Dec 2009 | 10:25 amI’ve recently written several articles on new backup and storage features in vSphere and spent a lot of time trying to learn more about the vStorage APIs and the new Changed Block Tracking (CBT) feature to understand how it works, so I thought I would share that information. CBT is a new feature in vSphere that can keep track of the blocks of a virtual disk that have changed since a certain point in time. This is extremely useful for backup and replication applications that can use this information to greatly improve incremental backup and replication times. Without CBT these… -
Giving vThanks this holiday season
30 Nov 2009 | 9:26 amWith the holiday spirit of thanks and giving, I thought I would make a list of the virtualization-related things that I give thanks for, so here it is: I give thanks for High Availability; how many times have you saved the day by bringing my VMs back up on other hosts after a failure? I give thanks to the blogging community for providing me with some outstanding information on a daily basis. I give thanks to the VMTN communities for getting me started with helping others and showing me how much I enjoy it. I give thanks to Distributed Power Management which helps save my company money by…
- Virtually Speaking
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Rugged Software Organization: Improving Software Quality and Security
9 Feb 2010 | 3:00 amGet on the rugged software bandwagon! -
Leostream's Connection Broker 6.3 enhanced for Xen, Sun VDI
8 Feb 2010 | 9:14 amLeostream’s enhanced Connection Broker makes it easier for companies to deploy hosted virtual desktop infrastructures, especially those on Xen and Sun. Version 6.3 of the vendor neutral broker, officially announced on Feb. 8, offers a new web client, enhanced policies and administration functions, as well as additional platform support. On the Xen front, Leostream’s Java [...] -
"Cloud computing": What is it exactly?
8 Feb 2010 | 4:00 amWall Street Journal comments on cloud computing -
Swype text entry for smart handhelds
4 Feb 2010 | 4:00 amOne of the features that I’ve always liked about Microsoft’s Windows Mobile is the fact that many of its features can be changed by the addition of third party software. Microsoft, unlike Apple, seems to welcome the efforts of third parties to improve and enhance how their software works. Apple appears to be telling its [...] -
Park Community Federal Credit Union - Double-Take Customer Profile
3 Feb 2010 | 3:30 amPark Community Federal Credit Union uses Double-Take Availability
- VM /ETC
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VMware PEX2010: Conference So Far. vExpert Meeting Info
9 Feb 2010 | 7:10 amvExpert Meeting Location, and Panoramics So Far VMware PEX officially starts today, but it’s been a full 2 and a half days of pre conference sessions, meetings, and get-togethers for me already. This post is a random mix of video, information, and links. Sorry for the mess! Video: PEX2010 Panoramics So Far Here’s a quick 30 second video of my conference so far. The photo quality stinks because all I have is my Blackberry to take pictures, but the video is fast and the music is upbeat. vExpert Meeting Location and time I’ve been emailed that somewhere around 30 vExperts are attending… -
VMware PEX2010: Night of Nines and Saturday Random Thoughts
7 Feb 2010 | 6:14 amSaturday was my travel day to VMware Partner Exchange 2010 in Las Vegas, NV. I left Atlanta at 1:30 pm EST and finally checked into my room at the Mandalay Bay Hotel around 4:30 pm PST. All it took was a couple of tweets and I was able to make plans with Theron Conrey for dinner. Like Theron, several others were already in town for the 3 day Virtual Infrastructure Design Boot Camp. So, in about 90 minutes we had a group of nine headed over to the Nine Fine Irishmen at the New York, New York Hotel & Casino. I did not realize last night’s “Night of Nines” until writing about it just… -
VMware Partner Exchange 2010: PTAB, Tweet Ups, And Vegas. Oh My!
3 Feb 2010 | 8:28 pmIt’s not quite VMworld, but if you work for a VMware partner in North America chances are good your are going to Las Vegas next week for VMware Partner Exchange 2010 (PEX2010) at the Mandalay Bay Resort and Casino. I’m sure there are more than a few that are traveling from overseas to attend as well. I’m headed out this Saturday, and a full week of PEX2010 starts for me early Sunday morning. Follow the event posts here on VM /ETC or catch my "micro blogging" on Twitter (@rbrambley). Be sure to watch the hash tag #vmwarepex as well as the event’s twitter… -
Rack Your Home Lab With $8 IKEA Lack Tables
31 Jan 2010 | 9:16 amThe LackRack Most of my colleagues have a home lab with at least some equipment that is rackable, but because of expense, room size, or the decor concerns of a much smarter significant other purchasing a data center rack is not possible (or advisable). In fact, our servers, storage and switches are stacked under a desk, piled in a corner, or hidden in a coat closet. Virtualization and server consolidation has helped reduce the total amount of hardware we need running at home, but we still end up with a makeshift and cluttered workspace that keeps us in the dog house. Now, imagine this… -
If You Were An OEM Facing The Cloud What Would You Do?
30 Jan 2010 | 10:30 amBefore the Alliance, Coalition, and Partnership start the Cloud Wars, everybody raise your Guinness and say “Brilliant!” YouTube Guinness Brilliant Six Pack Commercial It’s obvious now that Cloud Computing is no longer just a concept. Amazon EC2 has been around for a while, vCloud Express was announced late last year, Microsoft is moving full steam ahead with Azure, and new internal cloud infrastructure and storage solutions are appearing on the scene weekly. CTOs and IT Directors are starting to see legitimate solutions for offloading some or all of their development and…
- Mike D's Blog
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VMware ESXi Scripting Contest
4 Feb 2010 | 7:24 amCalling all coding hacks! Back in December, VMware launched the VMware Script-O-Mania contest. The goal of the Script-O-Mania contest is to help our wider community adopt ESXi by providing useful, fun and powerful scripts to manage the ESXi platform. But this isn’t just fun and games – there’s real prizes! 1st Prize $2,500 2nd Prize $1,000 3rd Prize $500 So polish off those scripting skills and get coding. The contest ends on March 15, 2010. You can find full details and submit your entry here. -
The Fujitsu Cloud API
21 Dec 2009 | 8:09 amRecently, Fujitsu submitted their cloud API to the DMTF for consideration in the standards process. The news caught my eye a long time ago and I read up on the effort a long time ago but just never got around to blogging about it. Well, here I am with time to blog so let me give you a quick run down of what’s going on and then link you to a great post by William Vanbenepe for more detailed information. VMware had submitted our vCloud API to the DMTF a while back. This was an effort to get the conversation and process started on creating a standardized cloud API for all to use. We… -
The Enterprise Cloud Buyers Council (ECBC)
17 Dec 2009 | 7:48 amAs I stated on Tuesday, I was speaking on a cloud panel at a TMForum event last week. It was a really great event. One of the things that TMForum announced the day that I was down there was the Enterprise Cloud Buyers Council. It’s a really interesting group that combines leading Enterprises in the cloud space with leading Service Providers/Telcos in the cloud space to figure out what Enterprises really need from a cloud. This is something that nearly everyone I’ve talked to in the cloud vendor world has struggled to truly understand. Sure there are some base requirements out… -
Dilbert on Cloud
16 Dec 2009 | 9:17 amI’m sure you’ve all seen this by now but just in case – this one is hillarious. -
Where’s Waldo?
14 Dec 2009 | 11:53 pmI’ve had a lot of people ping me lately asking where the heck I’ve been. My last post was back in July and wasn’t very cloudy then either. The truth of the matter is I’ve been working completely on cloud. The market has taken off and everyone wants to launch something ASAP and thankfully VMware has been the centerpiece for every single cloud out there (except Microsoft, Google, and Amazon). I was recently just at an all day cloud track at TMForum where most of the major telcos, service providers, and enterprise cloud players from around the world had all gathered…
- Yellow Bricks
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Should I buy ThinPrint? Real-world numbers
9 Feb 2010 | 7:48 amThose doing planning might well be interested in these stats from a real-world ThinPrint deployment in respect of how well it compresses jobs. We started by testing a job typical of the users; a PDF consisting of scanned black and white pages. He we measured the data passed on the network for each of ThinPrint’s compression settings. Setting Job size (%) Quality None 100 Original Optimal 90 Near perfect Maximum 58 Good; useable Extreme 19 Medium; readable No images Not tested Pretty decent, we thought, for a test document that is all A4 images. Now to try a pilot. One all VDI office has… -
vSphere Security Hardening Guide script by @lamw
8 Feb 2010 | 9:28 amA couple of weeks ago I blogged about the vSphere Security Hardening Guide. Just a couple of days later William “the king of Perl” Lam already produced a script that checks the Hardening Guide best practices against your environment. It produces a great html based report. Source While going through the COS/HOST and VM documentation, I noticed there were quite a few checks that might benefit from having a script to validate the guidelines and that was the motivation for this script. Not all sections can be validated using the vSphere APIs and will require some manual validation and… -
Storage Masking?
5 Feb 2010 | 6:04 amI received a bunch of questions around storage masking over the last couple of weeks. One of them was around VMware’s best practice to mask LUNs on a per cluster basis. The best practice has been around for years and basically is there to reduce conflicts. More hosts accessing the same LUNs means more overhead, just to give you an example every 5 minutes a rescan of both HBAs takes place automatically to check for dead storage paths. You can imagine that there’s a difference between 32+ hosts accessing your storage or limiting it to for instance 16 hosts. The obvious next question… -
Win an Apple iPad for you and your friends!
3 Feb 2010 | 2:13 pmThis is just a reminder. The ESXi scripting contest is still running. Make sure you enter the competition. So far not many people have so chances of winning are pretty big! VMware challenges you to build the best, most creative ESXi management scripts possible. The goal of the ScriptoMania contest is to help our wider community adopt ESXi by providing useful, fun and powerful scripts to manage the ESXi platform. The best part is that we give our winners bragging rights and we put some hard cold cash in your pockets. Are you up to the challenge? Contest Overview: Chance to win up to $2500… -
E1000 and dropped rx packets
2 Feb 2010 | 5:49 amAt a customer site we received several notifications of performance issues with a VMware VI3 environment. After having checked the configuration of the VMs and the Hosts we decided to dive into esxtop. At first sight we did not see any abnormalities. Low %RDY, which is usually the first thing I check, some swapping but not enough to cause any major delays. The weird thing about this one is that it seemed that only when IP was sent/received the VM felt sluggish. As we could not reproduce the issue we decided to start esxtop in batchmode and use esxplot and perfmon to get to the bottom of it.
- VMware Videos.com
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VIDEO: My Home VMware vSphere Lab
20 Jan 2010 | 11:56 amHere 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. -
VIDEO: Jumpstart ESXi and P2V with VMware GO
3 Dec 2009 | 10:27 amI 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! <span class=”mceItemObject” classid=”clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000″ id=”ooyalaPlayer_12af9_g2qklx5s” width=”600″… -
VIDEO: vStorage APIs for Data Protection and Avamar 5
30 Nov 2009 | 2:08 pmChad 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 -
VIDEO: Using VMware ESX Performance Charts
30 Nov 2009 | 2:05 pmHere is my new video blog post over at VirtualizationAdmin.com covering how to use VMware ESX Server Performance charting… -
VIDEO: What is VMware vCloud Express and how can it help you?
23 Nov 2009 | 7:00 amCheckout my latest video from VirtualizationAdmin.com and learn what vCloud Express is all about and how it can help you!
- VMware Tips
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Chapter 3 - A New Beginning…
15 Jan 2010 | 3:31 pmThe first decade of a new century of a new millennium has recently ended. The past ten years have been the most challenging, painful and yet most rewarding in my entire life. I’ve lost many friends, but I’ve gained many new ones. I’ve lost love, but have found new love that is deeper than ever before. I’ve found a greater respect for family and being together. I’ve also seen the world reach an all time high, then crash lower than it ever has before. All of the situations, feelings and things that someone would normally endure over a lifetime, I’ve… -
NetXen HP NC522SFP Network Flooding
11 Jan 2010 | 5:49 pmI had a very fun weekend. It started at 4am Saturday with a migration of ~125 virtual machines from an old AMD based environment to a new Intel Nehalem based environment. Who could’ve known that within a few hours all hell would’ve broken loose. Enter in problem of network flooding from the NetXen based HP branded NC522SFP. Because all of the 10GbE ports from the (9) new ESXi servers were creating thousands of pause frames on the Cisco Nexus 5020 switches, I thought originally that it was an issue on the switch. Talks with Cisco revealed nothing. We attempted to disconnect… -
VMwareTips.com 2009 Holiday Giveaway Extravaganza - WINNERS
4 Jan 2010 | 12:10 pmFirst of all, thank you very much to our sponsors for putting this together, EMC/IOMEGA and VEEAM. Now the part you’ve all been waiting for. Our third place winner, taking home some Veeam Backup and Recovery licenses is: Gil Salazar from Tucson, AZ Our second place winner, taking home a Veeam Management Suite license is: Abe Lister from Glen Burnie, MD (drum roll please)…and, our Grand Prize winner, taking home an IOMEGA IX4-100 is: Herbert Tucker from Keyport, NJ Once again, thank you to the sponsors and a very special Thank You to all the participants. Thank you for making… -
Vote for VMwareTips.com
4 Jan 2010 | 7:49 amWow, I cannot believe it is already 2010. I believe this year is going to bring some great things. For me it will bring a new home and the beginning of a new chapter in my life, I can’t wait! I also feel it’s going to be the year of VDI and that virtualization is really going to hit the world even harder than it has already. I’m excited to see what’s in store for I.T. this year, and I’ll be even more excited to blog about it. With that said, Eric Siebert at vSphere-Land.comis looking to update his Top Bloggers list. I’ve held positions #11 on the list for… -
ESX 4.0 Update 1A
11 Dec 2009 | 10:27 pmA new patch has been made available for ESX 4.0 Update 1, this is called Update 1A. It only affects ESX and not ESXi. Here is an except of the alert put out by VMware: ESX 4.0, Update 1, Alert: Upgrading ESX 4.0 to 4.0 U1 can fail or time out and leave the host in an unusable state if using HP Systems Insight Management Agent. ESX 4.0 Update 1a (a re-release of ESX 4.0 Update1) that addresses this issue is available. Please read KB article (ID 1016070) before proceeding with the upgrade. As I said above, this patch is listed as ESX 4.0 Update 1A and can be found on the VMware Downloads…
- Citrix XenServer
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Increase Product Visibility Through Citrix Ready
9 Feb 2010 | 5:57 amThe Citrix Ready program is the primary partner technology alliance program at Citrix. The program has received tremendous response from its inception in 2006 and has verified more than a 1000 products which are featured on the Citrix Ready catalog. Citrix Ready program offers its partner a unique opportunity to promote their products online and is designed to highlight the product features and demonstrate the products compatibility with Citrix. Some of the essential benefits of the program for Citrix partners include; Generating new revenue opportunities for partner products Increasing… -
Windows on iPad
7 Feb 2010 | 10:35 amOr any Application for that matter. Chris Fleck gave fair warning. I'm here to tell you that it works and its here, now. The computing model just got turned on it's ear. Why would you want this? Because it increases your mobility without having to reboot your laptop everytime you want to use it, it saves time and money, and it delivers any Windows platform or application to your iPhone, iPod or iPad. What was previously just a future scenario is now a reality. Citrix runs Windows and Windows Applications from a central server, called XenDesktop, and pipes it out to your mobile device through… -
Office Communicator voice & video on XD4, and federation, too!
5 Feb 2010 | 12:06 pmSince I wrote my blog post about delivering VoIP apps with XenDesktop 4 and HDX RealTime, numerous readers have kindly posted comments or emailed me about the great results they're getting with our new optimized-for-speech audio codec. And don't forget, XenDesktop 4 introduced isochronous USB support, too. One customer wrote to share their experience using a federated Microsoft Office Communications Server (OCS) infrastructure with Wyse HDX Ready thin clients, HP server hardware, Polycom USB handsets and Microsoft webcams. Without naming this major telecommunications company or disclosing any… -
New Heights for XenServer Single Server Scalability with XenDesktop
5 Feb 2010 | 11:06 amWe recently conducted a series of tests to determine the limits of VM density for a single XenServer 5.5 host running XenDesktop VMs (XenServer Single Server Scalability with XenDesktop). Previously, our VM-per-host limit for typical server-based workloads had been only 50. We knew, as did our customers and partners from their own experience running XenDesktop workloads on XenServer, that the real number of desktop VMs possible on a single host was considerably higher. The results of our tests were better than expected---130 Windows XP… -
XenServerと無償WANシミュレーションソフトを使って、自在にネットワークをあやつろう
5 Feb 2010 | 6:03 amデスクトップ仮想化製品を評価する時、WAN環境やLAN環境で使用できる帯域が限られているネットワークでのパフォーマンスを評価する事は重要なポイントである。ネットワークシミュレーションソフトかなり高価なので頭を悩ませている方も多いのではないだろうか。 そこで無料のWANemというソフトを使用して簡易的にネットワークをシミュレーションを行うことができるのでその方法を紹介したいと思う。…
- VCritical
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Win $2500 with your 1337 VMware ESXi scripting skillz
2 Feb 2010 | 10:37 amVMware is currently running a VMware ESXi scripting contest. Top prize is $2500, which is not too shabby for doing something productive. Check out the details and get scripting! Related posts:New VMware ESXi Management Kit Create ESXi 4 USB flash drives with Workstation VMware ESXi and Hyper-V installation comparison The VMware ESXi 4 64MB Hypervisor Challenge Leave a Comment • Subscribe to RSS • Subscribe via Email • Follow Eric Gray on Twitter More articles on: ESXi, scripting • Browse All Virtualization Content Win $2500 with your 1337 VMware ESXi scripting skillz by Eric Gray ©… -
Hello Dynamic Memory?
1 Feb 2010 | 8:52 pmLooks like I was on to something a few weeks back when I showed how Microsoft had tried — but failed — to implement a feature that would allow Hyper-V R2 to accommodate the use of more virtual machine memory than available on the underlying physical host. A screenshot of Dynamic Memory configuration in a post-RTM build of Windows Server 2008 R2 has surfaced in an article at Softpedia. Listen… Do you hear that? It’s the sound of Microsoft Virtualization curbing their criticism of memory overcommit. Hat tip to Aidan Finn Related posts:The Truth About Hyper-V Memory… -
Hyper-V More Stable, Just as Mature as VMware vSphere?
21 Jan 2010 | 3:29 pmI just read a fascinating article on the Microsoft Virtualization blog from a special guest poster responding to the recent InformationWeek article that cited 9 reasons Hyper-V is not ready for the Enterprise. The author worked extra hard to refute all 9 points — but I do admit being somewhat distracted by the gratuitous use of VMWare throughout. Evidently, proofreading — unlike immeasurable technology and services discounts — is not one of the benefits extended to guest posters these days, which is a shame. The Microsoft Virtualization MVP tries to use most of the pages… -
VCritical in the top vDozen at vSphere-land
19 Jan 2010 | 7:27 amDear Readers, Thank you for supporting VCritical in the latest round of vSphere-land top virtualization blogs from Eric Siebert. I am very pleased to be voted into the #12 slot among a huge selection of talented professionals, moving up one notch from my previous position at lucky #13. The message is clear — I will continue writing about VMware and competitive topics and I very much appreciate your ongoing support! Best regards, Eric Related posts:Vote VCritical — for change vLaunchPad: Lucky number thirteen! Got Gravatar? First year of VCritical -
The Truth About Hyper-V Memory Overcommit
13 Jan 2010 | 5:20 amThe ability to assign more memory to virtual machines than physically available on a host is called memory overcommit and is a major factor that contributes to higher VM density — running more virtual machines per host increases efficiency and reduces cost. VMware ESX has provided this feature for multiple generations, giving it an advantage over competing hypervisors. The Cost Per Application Calculator makes it clear that investing in VMware vSphere 4 significantly reduces your datacenter hardware footprint and associated costs. Scott Drummonds, the VMware performance expert,…
- VCritical
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Win $2500 with your 1337 VMware ESXi scripting skillz
2 Feb 2010 | 10:37 amVMware is currently running a VMware ESXi scripting contest. Top prize is $2500, which is not too shabby for doing something productive. Check out the details and get scripting! Related posts:New VMware ESXi Management Kit Create ESXi 4 USB flash drives with Workstation VMware ESXi and Hyper-V installation comparison The VMware ESXi 4 64MB Hypervisor Challenge Leave a Comment • Subscribe to RSS • Subscribe via Email • Follow Eric Gray on Twitter More articles on: ESXi, scripting • Browse All Virtualization Content Win $2500 with your 1337 VMware ESXi scripting skillz by Eric Gray ©… -
Hello Dynamic Memory?
1 Feb 2010 | 8:52 pmLooks like I was on to something a few weeks back when I showed how Microsoft had tried — but failed — to implement a feature that would allow Hyper-V R2 to accommodate the use of more virtual machine memory than available on the underlying physical host. A screenshot of Dynamic Memory configuration in a post-RTM build of Windows Server 2008 R2 has surfaced in an article at Softpedia. Listen… Do you hear that? It’s the sound of Microsoft Virtualization curbing their criticism of memory overcommit. Hat tip to Aidan Finn Related posts:The Truth About Hyper-V Memory… -
Hyper-V More Stable, Just as Mature as VMware vSphere?
21 Jan 2010 | 3:29 pmI just read a fascinating article on the Microsoft Virtualization blog from a special guest poster responding to the recent InformationWeek article that cited 9 reasons Hyper-V is not ready for the Enterprise. The author worked extra hard to refute all 9 points — but I do admit being somewhat distracted by the gratuitous use of VMWare throughout. Evidently, proofreading — unlike immeasurable technology and services discounts — is not one of the benefits extended to guest posters these days, which is a shame. The Microsoft Virtualization MVP tries to use most of the pages… -
VCritical in the top vDozen at vSphere-land
19 Jan 2010 | 7:27 amDear Readers, Thank you for supporting VCritical in the latest round of vSphere-land top virtualization blogs from Eric Siebert. I am very pleased to be voted into the #12 slot among a huge selection of talented professionals, moving up one notch from my previous position at lucky #13. The message is clear — I will continue writing about VMware and competitive topics and I very much appreciate your ongoing support! Best regards, Eric Related posts:Vote VCritical — for change vLaunchPad: Lucky number thirteen! Got Gravatar? First year of VCritical -
The Truth About Hyper-V Memory Overcommit
13 Jan 2010 | 5:20 amThe ability to assign more memory to virtual machines than physically available on a host is called memory overcommit and is a major factor that contributes to higher VM density — running more virtual machines per host increases efficiency and reduces cost. VMware ESX has provided this feature for multiple generations, giving it an advantage over competing hypervisors. The Cost Per Application Calculator makes it clear that investing in VMware vSphere 4 significantly reduces your datacenter hardware footprint and associated costs. Scott Drummonds, the VMware performance expert,…
- Vmware Scripting
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Environment at a glace report (outputs to excel)
9 Feb 2010 | 10:45 am[code]$initalTime = Get-Date$filepath = "C:\tmp"$filename = "forecast"$date = Get-Date ($initalTime) -uformat %Y%m%d$time = Get-Date ($initalTime) -uformat %H%M$VCList = @("virtualcenter")function Get-VMClusterHosts ($VMCluster) { $VMClusterH... -
Verify the correct number of paths on your ESX hosts
9 Feb 2010 | 10:29 am[code]$initalTime = Get-Date$filepath = "C:\tmp"$filename = "LunPathState"$date = Get-Date ($initalTime) -uformat %Y%m%d$time = Get-Date ($initalTime) -uformat %H%MWrite-Host "$(Get-Date ($initalTime) -uformat %H:%M:%S) - Starting" $AllHosts = G... -
Extend a virtual disk
9 Feb 2010 | 10:24 amCode:get-vm "test vm" | get-harddisk | where {$_.CapacityKB -eq "20971520"} | set-harddisk -CapacityKB 25971520 -
Report number of ports per vswitch
9 Feb 2010 | 7:13 am[code]$report = @()foreach ($vmhost in get-cluster | get-vmhost) { $switchinfo = get-virtualswitch $vmhost foreach ($vmswitch in $switchinfo) { $report += "" | select-object ( @{Name ... -
Re: Help with script - List all VMs
1 Feb 2010 | 5:12 amThanks for your feedback.I ended up doing this:<code>$domain = read-host "What domain (a1, a2, b1, b1)"$role = read-host "What role (AP, EX.....)"$servers = $domain + $role + 'W*'get-vm -name $servers</code>Worked like a charm... The only probl...
- Windows Server 2008 and Microsoft virtualization blog
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Install SUSE Linux on Hyper-V
3 Feb 2010 | 2:31 pmMicrosoft officially supports SUSE Linux as a guest machine. You can install it and even get a official support from Microsoft if you have some problems. There are also Linux integration components available to download, which can help you enhance your experience using Linux as a guest machine. Ever wondered how the installation process [...] Copyright © Ilija Brajkovic http://www.brajkovic.info -
Hyper-V vs. VMWare vs. Xen
31 Jan 2010 | 12:56 pmHere is one post that might start a flame between my readers. When you try to compare Hyper-V vs. VMWare vs. Xen, you will see that there is no “the best” solution. Every solution has it pros and cons. Which ones? Rick Vanover wrote a great article at Techtarget, trying to compare there three [...] Copyright © Ilija Brajkovic http://www.brajkovic.info -
Hyper-V Architecture
31 Jan 2010 | 12:35 pmHyper-V, used for server virtualization in Windows Server 2008 R2 , is a microkernelized hypervizor. What it really means, I tried to explain in my post about microkernelized hypervizors, but here a video showing you more details about it. This short video has been recorded by Ben Armstrong, a.k.a. The Virtual PC Guy, Product [...] Copyright © Ilija Brajkovic http://www.brajkovic.info -
Very small Hyper-V Manager
27 Jan 2010 | 2:37 pmThere is a new, very simple and very easy to use Hyper-V Manager available to download and use for free. This tool has been written by Jerry Orman. It is not fully featured application, and should not (and can’t) be used for complex deployments and usage. It sits in a system tray, and enables [...] Copyright © Ilija Brajkovic http://www.brajkovic.info -
28% discount on a TechNet subscription
25 Jan 2010 | 1:57 pmHere is a great offer for you: if you are interested in getting a TechNet subscription, there is a 28% discount available if you use promo code TNITE06. With TechNet subscription you can get Microsoft software for evaluation purposes, beta software, professional support incidents, managed newsgroup support, technical resources, Microsoft eLearning courses and online [...] Copyright © Ilija Brajkovic http://www.brajkovic.info







