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vSphere PowerCLI
Stuff worth checking out.

Carter Shanklin

30 Jun 2009 | 10:45 am

There’s been a lot of PowerCLI-related stuff going on lately that’s worth checking out. vProfiles and more. Monsieur Alan Renouf has been hard at work lately and had turned out some really amazing stuff. The first is what he calls vProfiles. From the looks of it, vProfiles is still in a fairly early stage, but right now it is able to duplicate virtual switch and portgroup information between two ESX hosts via a graphical interface. Alan also posted a video showing the script in action. vProfiles from Alan Renouf on Vimeo. This looks really exciting and Alan is looking to improve its…
Finding and fixing VMs connected to missing port groups.

Carter Shanklin

26 Jun 2009 | 10:30 am

Yesterday someone took the liberty of upgrading one of my ESX servers that I use to run a virtual vSphere lab. Fortunately he was kind enough to preserve all of the VMs, and they were restored and re-registered after the upgrade. There was one detail that he didn’t notice, which was that my virtual vSphere lab VMs were all connected to an internal network called “Internal”. When I got in today my lab didn’t work at all because there was no networking between vCenter and the ESX hosts or their shared storage. The network cards all said they were attached to the “Internal” network,…
Listing RDMs and adding NFS datastores all over the place.

Carter Shanklin

22 Jun 2009 | 8:29 am

This post is going to cover some useful and popular recent content seen on our community. If you haven’t seen our community, it really is the best way to learn about PowerCLI and start getting automated. Today I’m going to touch on two topics. First, I’ll cover a script to list all RDM information, then give a script that will let you add NFS datastores to all your hosts in one shot. Listing RDM Information If you’re wondering what an RDM is or why you might use it, check out Rich Brambley’s blog for a really good explanation. Long story short is that RDMs are often used because you…
VMworld 2008 “Managing VMware With PowerShell” session now available free.

Carter Shanklin

4 Jun 2009 | 7:39 pm

Last year at VMworld I gave a talk about PowerCLI (back then it was VI Toolkit for Windows) which was attended by about 650 people. No eggs were thrown so I have to guess it was an ok session. Eric Siebert agreed and recommended that it be made freely available. Well, now it is, and you can view the session using your VMworld account. The session has a high-level overview of PowerCLI, samples and a couple of pretty cool demos courtesy of my colleague Andrey Anastasov and Mr. PowerGUI, Dmitry Sotnikov of Quest Software. If you’re hoping to get your vSphere environment more automated, it’s…
June 2009 PowerCLI Webinar: The aftermath.

Carter Shanklin

3 Jun 2009 | 11:22 am

In case you missed our June 2009 PowerCLI webinar, a replay is available. In this webinar I covered some tips for getting stats out of vSphere, viewing log data and advanced configuration. I’ve made all the scripts used in this presentation available for download. Bonus: There is also a sample in there that shows scheduling a nightly report. You can also see the presentation on slideshare. June 2009 PowerCLI Webinar View more presentations from vmwarecarter. Other important links mentioned in the webinar were: VI Toolkit Extensions VESI (A graphical frontend to PowerCLI) Enjoy

VMware Networking Blog
VMotion between Data Centers—a VMware and Cisco Proof of Concept

Guy Brunsdon

29 Jun 2009 | 10:47 am

VMotion, the VMware feature that enables live VM migration between ESX hosts is one of the major attractions of vSphere and before that, VMware Infrastructure (or VI for short). It’s simply quite amazing to watch a VM continue operation and maintain sessions while moving from one host to another. As cool as this is, we’re often asked, “How do we take that one step further, and perform VMotion between datacenters?” This, of course, is a non-trivial thing to do. There is the challenge of moving a VM over distance (which involves some degree of additional latency) without dropping…
vSphere 4 and Nexus 1000V---How to: (1) Get, (2) Install, (3) Use with an Evaluation License

Guy Brunsdon

25 Jun 2009 | 12:00 am

Neal Mueller and Pierre Ettori over at Cisco have published a few short tutorial style videos on the Nexus 1000V. You can get to kick the tires for 60 days without it costing you a cent. The videos to look at are: How to install an (60-day) evaluation license for Nexus 1000V—this covers getting an eval copy of vSphere 4, Nexus 1000V, a 60-day license and installing it all. Note: go to our co-branded vSphere site to get your vSphere eval Detailed Feature Demo of Nexus 1000V—Pierre takes you through a 20-minute demo of the major Nexus 1000V features and shows the tight coupling with vCenter…
Nexus 1000V demo videos

Guy Brunsdon

17 Jun 2009 | 3:56 pm

While we’re on the subject of Nexus 1000V, Pierre-Emmanuel Ettori from Cisco has just posted a couple of videos on the Cisco Data Center blog. The videos take you on an in-depth tour of the Nexus 1000V (configuration, port profiles, etc) and shows the tight integration with vCenter Server. If you haven’t seen the Nexus1000V in action, it’s well worth a look.
Nexus 1000V and VN-Link confusion

Guy Brunsdon

17 Jun 2009 | 3:45 pm

We’ve seen a lot of excitement around our vNetwork Distributed Switch and also the Cisco Nexus 1000V virtual switch. A little confusion, however, has arisen around physical switch dependencies for the Nexus 1000V. I understand the confusion as the Nexus 1000V (which is software based and available now) and VN-link (hardware based and not yet available) with Nexus 5000 are often presented together. So, for the record … the Cisco Nexus 1000V will operate with any physical switch (that we know of)—Cisco Catalyst, Nexus, Foundry, HP, Force 10, etc, etc. Of course, some of the special…
Virtual Switches vs Physical Switches plus more on “Let’s Talk Security …”

Guy Brunsdon

16 Jun 2009 | 7:52 pm

After posting the “Let’s Talk Security …” blog entry last week, our engineering director reminded me of a few more things worth pointing out. Virtual switches are very much like physical switches, but they do differ in a few ways relevant to the security discussion around MAC flooding and spanning tree attacks. Virtual switches know the MAC addresses of the VMs and vmkernel ports by registration. It’s all controlled by the ESX hypervisor, so there is no need to “learn” any MAC addresses. vSwitches will also toss any frames with a destination MAC address outside what is…

VMware Security Blog
DMZ Virtualization Using VMware vSphere 4 and the Cisco Nexus 1000V Virtual Switch

Charu Chaubal

1 Jul 2009 | 12:44 pm

One of the most exciting new features of vSphere 4 is the ability to use a virtual switch from a 3rd party networking vendor, and the first instantiation of this is the Cisco Nexus 1000V. With this in place, network administrators who are used to working with Cisco devices can now monitor and manage the virtual switches on ESX just like they would any other physical switch. They can also set security policies and configurations that they know and are used to working with. This is an important aspect of being able to use vSphere in more security-sensitive applications,…
VMware vShield Zones 1.0 is generally available

Warren Wu

10 Jun 2009 | 5:14 pm

With the general availability of VMware vSphere 4 a few weeks ago, I just wanted to highlight for the security community that VMware vShield Zones is also part of that release and now generally available!vShield Zones is a new product for VMware and one of the newest members of the vSphere 4 product family, based on technology from our acquisition of Blue Lane Technologies. We had a lot of interest from customers around vShield Zones and had over 200 customers around the world registered for our recent private beta. It is part of the vSphere package starting with the Advanced…
VMware vShield Zones in private beta

Warren Wu

25 Mar 2009 | 2:01 pm

Just in case anyone missed the news from VMworld Europe 2009 last month, VMware launched a new security offering called VMware vShield Zones for our vSphere (formerly VI) platform. We think this is pretty exciting, as it's the first datacenter security product from VMware, and highlights Security's elevation to one of the six key pillars of our Virtual Datacenter OS architecture. (For those keeping score, I don't count vCenter Update Manager as a security product only because the patch management vendors themselves tend to more self-identify with system and…
Upcoming Virtualization Security and Compliance Webcasts

Rob Randell

25 Feb 2009 | 8:59 am

A quick intro for those that don't know me since this is my first time posting to our blog. My name is Rob Randell. I am a Senior Security and Compliance Specialist for the field here at VMware. I actually came to VMware through the Determina acquisition back in August of 2007 (I know, it has taken me a long time to post to the blog ;-). My role here at VMware is to talk to our customers and speak at industry events about the security and compliance implications of virtualization. The purpose of this posting is to let you all know about a couple of…
How Virtualization Affects PCI Compliance

Charu Chaubal

3 Feb 2009 | 5:19 pm

VMware and Foundstone recently completed a two-part white paper on how virtualization affects PCI Compliance. It takes a pragmatic view at the different components of virtualization technologies and provides a perspective on how enterprises that are looking to deploy such technologies should think about their impact on PCI compliance initiatives.Part 1: Mapping PCI Requirements and VirtualizationThis paper presents a mapping for the various and relevant PCI requirements and how these are impacted by virtualization. Part 2: A Review of the Top 5 IssuesThis paper highlights what we…

VROOM!
SQL Sever performance on VMware vSphere 4.0

Priya Sethuraman

26 Jun 2009 | 11:39 am

VMware recently published a whitepaper titled “Performance and Scalability of Microsoft SQL Server on VMware vSphere 4“ that demonstrates VMware vSphere 4.0 can virtualize large SQL Server deployments with excellent performance and scalability. The paper documents results for a resource intensive OLTP workload running against a SQL Server 2008 database on the Windows Server 2008 operating platform and highlights single-VM as well as multi-VM performance In an 8vCPU virtual machine, we achieve OLTP throughput that is 86% of physical machine performance In…
Measuring the Cost of SMP with Mixed Workloads

Bruce Herndon

23 Jun 2009 | 3:33 pm

It is no secret that vSphere 4.0 delivers excellent performance and provides the capability to virtualize the beefiest of workloads. Several impressive performance studies using ESX 4.0 have been already been presented. (My favorite is this database performance whitepaper.) However, I continue to hear questions about the scheduling overhead of larger VMs within a heavily-utilized, mixed-workload environment. We put together a study using simple variations of VMware’s mixed-workload consolidation benchmark VMmark to help answer this question. For this study we chose two of the…
VMware breaks the 50,000 SPECweb2005 barrier using VMware vSphere 4

Sreekanth Setty

15 Jun 2009 | 10:59 am

VMware has achieved a SPECweb2005 benchmark score of 50,166 using VMware vSphere 4, a 14% improvement over the world record results previously published on VI3. Our latest results further strengthen the position of VMware vSphere as an industry leader in web serving, thanks to a number of performance enhancements and features that are included in this release. In addition to the measured performance gains, some of these enhancements will help simplify administration in customer environments. The key highlights of the current results include: Highly scalable virtual SMP performance. Over 25%…
SAP Performance with vSphere 4

Ken Barr

5 Jun 2009 | 2:08 pm

VMware recently published a whitepaper that demonstrates VMware vSphere 4’s excellent performance and scalability with SAP ERP software. The paper presents results of several experiments using VMware vSphere and SAP software with both the Microsoft Windows Server 2008 and SUSE Linux 10.2 operating systems.First, vSphere’s support for nested page tables (AMD Rapid Virtual Indexing, and Intel Extended Page Tables) is shown to provide a 15-82% performance boost for SAP's most MMU-intensive memory models. Next, the paper presents a "scale-up" study, comparing n-way…
Java Performance on vSphere 4

Harold Rosenberg

26 May 2009 | 10:49 am

VMware ESX is an excellent platform for deploying Java applications. Many customers use it to support Java applications from the desktop to business-critical enterprise servers. However, we haven't published any results recently highlighting the excellent performance of Java applications on VMware ESX. As a first step at remedying this situation, we compared native and virtualized performance using SPECjvm2008. This workload is a benchmark suite containing several real life applications and benchmarks focusing on core java functionality. The results demonstrate…

VMBLOG
FUJIFILM UK Focuses on DataCore's SANmelody for Storage Virtualization Cost Savings and Disaster Recovery

David Marshall

1 Jul 2009 | 1:38 pm

DataCore Software, the leading provider of storage virtualization, business continuity and disaster recovery software solutions, today announced that Read more at VMblog.com.
VirtenSys Delivers Industry's First Solution to Virtualize Servers' Direct-Attached Storage and Disk Drives

David Marshall

1 Jul 2009 | 5:23 am

VirtenSys, Ltd, the leader in delivering innovative PCI Express ® -based I/O Virtualization (IOV) switches for data centers, today announced the... Read more at VMblog.com.
Diskeeper Corporation Offers Complimentary License for XP Mode on Windows 7

David Marshall

1 Jul 2009 | 3:34 am

Diskeeper Corporation announced today that their End User Licence Agreement (EULA) has been updated to allow an additional complimentary license of... Read more at VMblog.com.
vSMP Foundation Supports HP ProLiant BL280c G6 Blade

David Marshall

30 Jun 2009 | 4:28 pm

ScaleMP, the leading provider of virtualization solutions for high-end computing, completed certification of vSMP Foundation for HP ProLiant BL280c... Read more at VMblog.com.
Red Hat Announces Premier Cloud Provider Certification and Partner Program to Enable Wider Enterprise Cloud Adoption

David Marshall

30 Jun 2009 | 4:26 pm

Red Hat, Inc., the world’s leading provider of open source solutions, today announced the Premier Cloud Provider Certification and Partner Program,... Read more at VMblog.com.

Virtualization.com
Pingbacks Not Suited For Dirty Minds: XenItalia.com

Robin Wauters

2 Jul 2009 | 5:27 am

————————————————————————————————————- ————————————————————————————————————— It’s always nice to get pingbacks on our blog posts, but sometimes they can be…
Diskeeper Offers Complimentary License for XP Mode on Windows 7

Robin Wauters

2 Jul 2009 | 5:17 am

————————————————————————————————————- ————————————————————————————————————— Diskeeper Corporation announced today that their End User Licence Agreement (EULA)…
VirtenSys Delivers Solution to Virtualize Servers’ Direct-Attached Storage and Disk Drives

Robin Wauters

2 Jul 2009 | 5:15 am

————————————————————————————————————- ————————————————————————————————————— VirtenSys today announced the industry’s first virtualization of storage…
Sun Microsystems Unleashes VirtualBox 3.0, Adds Many Server Virtualization Features

Robin Wauters

1 Jul 2009 | 2:26 am

————————————————————————————————————- ————————————————————————————————————— Sun Microsystems today announced a new version of Sun VirtualBox, its cross-platform…
Red Hat Launches Cloud Provider Certification and Partner Program

Robin Wauters

1 Jul 2009 | 2:22 am

————————————————————————————————————- ————————————————————————————————————— Red Hat today announced the Premier Cloud Provider Certification and Partner Program,…

virtualization news - Google News
The Impact of Virtualization Software on Operating Environments - TechRepublic

4 Jul 2009 | 5:28 pm

The Impact of Virtualization Software on Operating EnvironmentsTechRepublicOverview: Today's use of virtualization technology allows IT professionals to automatically manage the resources of the physical server to efficiently and more »
Building the Virtualized Enterprise with vmware Iinfrastructure - TechRepublic

4 Jul 2009 | 1:23 pm

Building the Virtualized Enterprise with vmware IinfrastructureTechRepublicOverview: vmware virtualization software has been adopted by over 120000 enterprise IT organizations worldwide. This paper clarifies how adopting vmware and more »
2 free Microsoft downloads are gobsmackingly good - Chicago Sun-Times

4 Jul 2009 | 8:15 am

2 free Microsoft downloads are gobsmackingly goodChicago Sun-TimesAs a concept, virtualization is like virtual-reality for software. What if every last thing that you were seeing and hearing and smelling and tasting and VirtualBox 3 brings 3D graphics supportArs TechnicaLabs Gallery: Sun xvm virtualbox 3.0 Ramps Up Challenge to vmware eWeekTool update virtualboxSecuObsTectonic -eWeekall 7 news articles »
Why Isn't Server Virtualization Saving Us More? A Few Small ... - TechRepublic

4 Jul 2009 | 12:26 am

Why Isn't Server Virtualization Saving Us More? A Few Small TechRepublicOverview: Companies have rapidly adopted server virtualization over the past few years, but there are big differences in their use of the technology. and more »
Driven by Virtualization, FAA's Flight Plan System Nears Completion - DailyTech

3 Jul 2009 | 9:43 am

DailyTechDriven by Virtualization, FAA's Flight Plan System Nears CompletionDailyTechThe new servers support virtualization for more efficient additions and workload distribution. (Source: Stratus) In September last year, DailyTech reported FAA Gets Its New Virtualized Flight-Plan System Off the GroundeWeekall 2 news articles »

News
Microsoft Ends Java Virtual Machine Support

3 Jul 2009 | 4:40 pm

Microsoft gave notice on Thursday that it removed 10 security patch downloads, all associated with Microsoft Java Virtual Machine technology
Forrester: Worst May Be Over for IT Market

2 Jul 2009 | 3:44 pm

IT purchasing has been so bad recently that things have got to be looking up.
Microsoft's 'Gazelle' Browser Concept Going on Tour

2 Jul 2009 | 2:13 pm

Why can't a Web browser be more like an operating system? That's a question being investigated with "Gazelle," an ongoing project at Microsoft Research.
Survey Finds BPM Projects Lack Architecture

2 Jul 2009 | 12:00 am

Organizations embarking on business process management need to bring in IT architects earlier in the process, report concludes.
Oracle Releases Fusion Middleware 11g and JDeveloper Update

1 Jul 2009 | 12:21 pm

In what could be one of its most significant releases this year, Oracle released its new Oracle Fusion Middleware suite and JDeveloper update.

DABCC: Virtualization Analysis
Citrix Geek Speak Local! in Coralville, IA June 25th

19 Jun 2009 | 12:50 pm

The information-packed days of Citrix Synergy 2009 are over and what an event it was! More than 3000 people gathered to examine the future of virtualization, networking and application delivery technologies designed to help companies maximize constrained IT spending. As a follow up to Synergy 2009, Alliance Technologies is hosting Geek Speak Local in Iowa City to provide facilitated learning from thought leaders and tech experts, including Matt Lesak, Daniel Feller, Jason Conger, Michael Thomas...
Project: Virtual Reality Check updated VMware ESX whitepaper released

5 Jun 2009 | 6:03 am

Project Virtual Reality Check's VMware ESX whitepaper has been updated with AMD's Rapid Virtualization Indexing (RVI) results. The impact of AMD Nested Page Tables (RVI is AMD's implementation of NPT) is benchmarked and analyzed. The outcome of these tests do really have a interesting positive impact in the amount of users on virtualized x86 Terminal Server platform. You can read the impact in the VMware ESX v1.1 whitepaper which can be downloaded from www.virtualrealitycheck.net ...
Citrix Dazzle: Beyond The User Storefront

20 May 2009 | 3:00 am

Let's take Dazzle a few steps beyond just providing a storefront for users to get the apps and content they need to do their day-to-day jobs. How can this new user interface help IT more? IT has always struggled with metrics and benchmarking to measure its value to the business. It's a simple concept really; measure the right things and business thrives; monitor the wrong things and you just might have an utter disaster on your hands....
Workspace Virtualization - a simpler Virtual Desktop powered by RingCube

1 May 2009 | 6:15 am

RingCube?s release of their vDesk 2.0 provides a powerful, lightweight solution that makes us ask the question; do we say we want virtual desktops, but only really need workspace virtualization?...
VMware vSphere Brings New Security Features

28 Apr 2009 | 12:00 pm

VMware vSphere brings new security features but does it really bring more security? This is the question the latest Virtualization Security Round Table podcast tried to answer. Unfortunately, the answer was not conclusive. I will try to explain the features and why things are so inconclusive....

blog.scottlowe.org
Republished: FlexClones or Deduplication?

slowe

3 Jul 2009 | 8:41 pm

Author’s Note: This content was first published over at Storage Monkeys, but it appears that it has since disappeared and is no longer available. For that reason, I’m republishing it here (with minor edits). Where applicable, I’ll also be republishing other old content from that site in the coming weeks. Thanks! I’ve discussed this topic before, but I felt like it was a topic that needed to be revisited again. Storage admins need to know how their choices in storage technologies may or may not impact virtualization efforts, and this particular choice—leveraging…
A Comment Policy Reminder

slowe

2 Jul 2009 | 8:50 pm

I encourage open discussion and conversation here on my site, and I’m thrilled that readers feel welcome to share their viewpoints (even when those viewpoints differ from my own). To help foster this sense of free discourse, there are two rules upon which I insist for all comments: First, all comments should be courteous. There’s no reason to personally attack another reader or author—simply state your position, why that is your position, the facts you feel support your position, etc. Leave the personal attacks somewhere else. Second, all commenters should provide full…
Republished: Dispelling Some VMware over NFS Myths

slowe

1 Jul 2009 | 6:13 am

Author’s Note: This content was first published over at Storage Monkeys, but it appears that it has since disappeared and is no longer available. For that reason, I’m republishing it here (with minor edits). Where applicable, I’ll also be republishing other old content from that site in the coming weeks. Thanks! In this article, I’m going to tackle what will probably be a sensitive topic for some readers: VMware over NFS. All across the Internet, I run into article after article after article that sings the praises of NFS for VMware. Consider some of the following…
Links for 2009-06-29 [del.icio.us]

30 Jun 2009 | 12:00 am

VMware KB - Index Page This is the full index of the VMware Knowledge Base.
Thinking Out Loud: Why Deploy FCoE?

slowe

29 Jun 2009 | 9:01 pm

This is another one of my “thinking out loud” posts. This time, the question I’m mulling is this one: why deploy FCoE? I haven’t hid the fact that I’m not really a fan of FCoE (see here or here), but I was starting to warm to the technology and thought that I was beginning to see some benefits to deploying FCoE. Namely, the fact that FCoE is inherently very compatible with “traditional” FCP, allowing organizations to leverage their existing FCP installation while transitioning to FCoE. Some hands-on time I’d recently spent with a Cisco Nexus…

Chris Wolf's Virtualization Tips and Ramblings
Catalyst 2009 is Right Around the Corner

Chris

2 Jul 2009 | 2:01 pm

This year’s Catalyst North America conference is in San Diego from July 27-31. With the speaker lineup all set, I thought it would be a good time to share more conference details. This year we have 2 1/2 days of cloud and virtualization coverage, with a special focus on architecture, performance, management integration, and security. The conference is providing extensive coverage of server and desktop virtualization, while highlighting practical steps to take on the path toward building an internal cloud. Our presenters will be deep diving on a number of important topics. For example,…
My VMworld 2009 Sessions

Chris

15 Jun 2009 | 1:44 pm

I’ll have four sessions at the upcoming VMworld Conference. If you’re interested, here are the details… BC2541 - Re-architecting Backup and Recovery for Virtual Environments: Best Practices Server virtualization is one of the fundamental building blocks of the dynamic data center and with it brings new management challenges, especially in the area of data protection and recovery. Existing data protection architectures may provide a short term serviceable solution, but lack the scalability to be a mainstay in tomorrow’s data center. Continued data growth is also compounding data…
Upcoming Webinar - Practical VM Security Techniques for Internal and External Virtualized Infrastructures

Chris

19 May 2009 | 7:51 am

I’ll be participating in a webinar on virtualization security on May 28th. I have included a description below and if you’re interested, you can register here. Date: Thursday May 28, 2009 Time: 2:00 PM ET / 11:00 AM PT Duration: 60 Minutes Practical VM Security Techniques for Internal and External Virtualized Infrastructures Jumping onto the virtualization bandwagon makes great economic sense but can be risky if done without proper security measures. In this webinar, Burton Group senior analyst Chris Wolf and executives from Trend Micro discuss current trends in virtual…
Free Burton Group Virtualization Seminar - Quebec May 21st

Chris

19 May 2009 | 7:34 am

If you’re in the area and have the time, Burton Group will be hosting a free virtualization seminar near Ottawa on the afternoon of May 21st. The details and registration information are below. Taming the Virtual Data Center: Current Problems, Best Practices, and Future Trends Thursday, May 21, 2009 from 1:30 PM until 4:30 PM HRSDC-RHDSC 140 Promenade du Portage Phase IV, Floor 1, Management Center Gatineau, Quebec K1A 0J9 Click here for map Seminar Attendees Receive Complimentary Report Windows Virtual Machine Guest OS Tuning and Optimization by Chris Wolf Featuring Presentations by…
Oracle Changes its Position on x86 Hypervisor Support (Unfair Licensing Remains)

Chris

19 May 2009 | 5:38 am

I’ve been covering Oracle licensing and support issues in x86 virtualized environments for quite some time, beginning with the January 2008 report “Virtualization Licensing and Support Lethargy: Curing the Disease That Stalls Virtualization Adoption.” You can also view these earlier blog posts for additional background: Oracle and the Big Elephant (August 2008) A New Year’s Resolution for Oracle (December 2008) Oracle Honors its New Year’s Resolution: Non-Oracle x86 Hypervisors are Now Supported (May 2009) A few weeks ago one of our clients pointed me to a recently published Oracle…

Gabes Virtual World
Rumor !!! VMworld US 2010 and VMworld Europe 2010 in same month

Gabe

2 Jul 2009 | 12:10 pm

Twitter is a great source of information confirmed and unconfirmed. I just learned from a tweet by vegard_s that VMware has plans to hold VMworld US and VMworld Europe as a back-to-back event. In... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]
Reclaiming unused VMDK space with storage thin provisioning

Gabe

30 Jun 2009 | 9:31 am

Storage thin provisioning can save space on a VMware Virtual Machine Disk File (VMDK), but reclaiming that space requires the use of tools described below. I have experimented with Virtual Machine... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]
The next step in virtualization: Virtual Computer’s NxTop

Gabe

22 Jun 2009 | 12:22 am

About half a year ago, I came across the website of Virtual Computer.com on which I read about a new Client Hypervisor called NxTop. Now the time is here to report about it, since the release is... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]
My new whitebox ESX home lab

Gabe

17 Jun 2009 | 3:01 am

Last week I was finally ably to buy the whiteboxes I wanted for my homelab. Untill then I had one ESX host at home that hosted my basic environment but because of that I couldn’t try other... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]
Vote for us in the Veeam Video Contest

Gabe

16 Jun 2009 | 4:55 am

When there is a contest for doing stupid but funny things, you will probably find my girlfriend and me joining in. With the Veeam Video Contest it is no different so we shot a nice little video to... [[ This is a content summary only. Visit my website for full links, other content, and more! ]]

Virtual Black Hole
Port Group Network Security Policy Action

I have done some posts on using PowerShell actions in vWire and have generally shared scripts that give basic functionality to do things like start and stop a virtual machine and other scripts to help gather more information like returning the contents of a log file, for example. Today's script ...
Working with Maintenance Mode in PowerShell

Today’s topic is working with PowerShell in vWire to enter and exit Maintenance Mode. If you do not have vWire installed yet you can download it here. Once you have vWire installed you will notice that there is a script action to exit Maintenance Mode. When writing scripts for entering ...
Using PowerShell in vWire

Since we launched vWire at the beginning of the month I have been asked a few times how to help people get their PowerShell scripts to work with vWire. This post is going to answer that question and give examples that you will need to make this happen. The first ...
Checking and Setting Time with vSphere PowerCLI and vWire

I posted earlier in the week that I was going to present some scripts that are using one of the new cmdlets from the vSphere PowerCLI. The scripts today are for getting and setting time information on the ESX hosts. If you have installed vWire then you can download the ...
Vote for the Top VMware Blogs and a Chance to Vote for Me!

My good friend Eric Siebert of vSphere-land is updating his top 20 VMware Blog list, and is looking for some help deciding what his Top 5 should be. I am currently rank #18 and I would really love to move up higher in the ranks with your help. You can see ...

h0bbel.p0ggel.org
Lenovo Rethinks and Brings ThinkVantage System Update (TVSU) back

Christian Mohn

Lenovo has turned 180° and brought ThinkVantage System Update (TVSU) back from the dead. In a blog post on "Inside the Box" called "ThinkVantage System Update Returns", Matt Kohut, Global Lenovo Strategist, announces that System Update has been revived.He goes on to explain that customer reactions, both blog posts and forum postings, has had such a big impact that it has caused Lenovo to rethink their decision.Following our announcement, however, we heard from many customers on our blogs and forums. We’ve heard clearly that our individual and business customers alike value TVSU highly.
Lenovo Discontinues ThinkVantage System Update (TVSU)

Christian Mohn

A while ago, Lenovo pulled the plug on the old ThinkVantage System Update (TVSU) infrastructure and announed that they would return in the beginning of May with a new and improved system. While I am all for improvement and progress, I questioned why Lenovo had to completely remove the old (somewhat) working driver repository before the "new and improved" system was in place. I was willing to live with that, as long as we got a new and improved system in place. I was, in fact, looking forward to see what Lenovo was up to.Today, I was pointed to this little gem on the Lenovo site Lenovo is…
Microsoft Hyper-V - Enterprise ready? Nope, thats a myth!

Christian Mohn

To follow up on the Microsoft Mythbusting Video Stu has dissected a Microsoft technical case study called How Microsoft Designs the Virtualization Host and Network Infrastructure.Head on over to vinternals and read Microsoft Myths and Realities…. As Stu concludes, VMware doesn't need marketing when Microsoft provides us with this kind of real life examples on how their infrastructure works.Thanks Microsoft, you just made my job much easier with regards to explaining to management why Hyper-V just doesn't cut it.
Habari 0.6 (finally) Released!

Christian Mohn

Habari 0.6 has been released into the wild. It's been a long time coming, but we're very happy to send a new release out the door. As the official release statement says Executive Summary: New release. Get.Noteworthy additions in the new version includes the new ACL permissions system, new API features and general improvements to the administration systemGrab your copy now and give it a test! We're confident you'll like it!
Microsoft Hyper-V "mythbusting video" busted

Christian Mohn

On the 3rd of April 2009, Microsoft released a video which was supposed to "bust" 10 "VMware Myths", but as far as I can see the entire video has backfired pretty badly.I'll let some of the brighter minds highlight the video content and dissect the myths, but I have to say this: Microsoft, please, if you want to play this game do it right. Make your own cases, don't try to disprove other people by highlighting their errors, erroneously. That doesn't work, sorry.Gabe posted "When myth busting goes wrong and becomes a myth to bust it self"Stu posted "Microsoft Hyper-V 2.0 - NO Memory…

Infoworld News
You don't know tech: The InfoWorld news quiz

Jason Snyder

3 Jul 2009 | 3:00 am

You win some; you lose some. This week China decided its Web censorship filtering software was not quite ready for prime time, while U.S. courts sentenced phone hackers and file swappers to some crime time. Another Facebook-wannabe went down the tubes, another gadget Web site got birthed, and yet one more politician is undressed, so to speak, by his own e-mails. Are you up to speed on all things geek? Prove it by acing our quiz. Correct answers are worth 10 points, and no, we won’t block your Web access if you mention Taiwan.
XHTML 2 language dumped in favor of HTML 5

Paul Krill

2 Jul 2009 | 1:52 pm

Looking to focus on the budding -- and game-changing -- HTML 5 specification, the W3C (World Wide Web Consortium) said Thursday it plans to increase available resources for the effort by discontinuing further development of XHTML 2. XHTML been an XML-based version of HTML and has been the subject of several W3C efforts ranging from XHTML 1.0 to XHTML Modularization and XHTML 2. The 2 version of the XHTML language was to offer capabilities for mobile systems and internationalization.
Cisco looks to accelerate virtualization deployments

admin

2 Jul 2009 | 11:56 am

Cisco is looking to accelerate the rate at which customers adopt and implement virtualization in their datacenters, company officials said at a Cisco customer event this week. Demand for virtualized datacenters is high, they said, due to the complexity of managing and provisioning physical resources, securing that environment, maximizing utilization of assets, numerous network connections, and the rising costs of facilities and energy usage.
Bing beats Google to the punch, launches Twitter search

admin

2 Jul 2009 | 10:17 am

Microsoft's Bing has beaten Google to the punch.Google has been rumored to be casting an eye toward creating a tool for searching social networking sites, like Twitter. But today, Bing came out and did it.
Browser vendor squabbles cause W3C to scrap codec requirement

admin

2 Jul 2009 | 9:14 am

The latest rewrite of the Web's mother tongue won't recommend the use of specific audio and video encoding formats that could make it cheaper and easier for people to distribute multimedia content. The major browser makers have been unable to agree on an encoding format they will support in their products, wrote Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML 5 specification for the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C).

Jumé latest news
Enable VMotion and iSCSI in scripted install

30 Jun 2009 | 7:31 am

Last week I posted my UDA experience. I was quite satisfied with the results, but for some reason I couldn't...
Following the UDA 2.0 Beta, found workarounds

29 Jun 2009 | 2:30 am

I've not been using the UDA for a long time since I didn't needed it. But I wanted to have...
v-Water: ESX4i overclocked, watercooled

23 Jun 2009 | 3:23 am

I had a small DIY weekend. I installed watercooling (I had it lying around here and didn't used it) on...
The Dynamic Infrastructure Worldwide Virtual Forum

19 Jun 2009 | 8:43 am

I received an email from my old IBM collegues. They are having a Virtual Forum about smarter management of your...
Upgraded VC2.5u2 to VC2.5u3, had some issues

19 Jun 2009 | 5:48 am

Case Yesterday we upgraded vCenter 2.5u2 to vCenter 2.5u3 (yeah, please don't ask why we didn't upgrade to u4). The...

Malaysia VMware Communities
Cisco Nexus 5000 POC

superman

2 Jul 2009 | 8:58 pm

The past one week have been busy with VMware vSphere 4 and Cisco Nexus 5000 POC and the result is really disappointed. Personally I couldn’t believed and I think I may missed out something. If anyone have any idea or suggestion, please feel free to comment here or post reply at slow Performance with 10 Gb CNA card on vSphere 4 thread. Benchmark Test Configuration 2 x VMware vSphere 4 hosts 2 x Dell PE2950 Hardware – Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5410 @ 2.33GHz – 16GB RAM – Qlogic QLE8042 10GbE Mercury Converged Network Adapter(CNA) – connected to PCIe 8x slot VMware…
Not possible to resize /var/log on vSphere 4 Host

craig

1 Jul 2009 | 4:43 am

As my previous experienced, if you having a disk space full on /var, the host server will hung and all the VMs on the host will stop functioning. I had my test machine setup as default configuration, which the /var/log only allocated for 2GB in place. Prior to move the system to production, I decide to extend the /var/log from 2GB to 10GB as our current standard. Here come to the idea that I try to extend, unmount and remount as I usually did on the Linux. I found that the partition table for vSphere 4 is totally different as ESX 3.5 did. At 1st was confusing as I only have 1 logical drive…
Virtualization on Blade

craig

28 Jun 2009 | 9:50 am

We see the growth in the market to be more aggressive for consolidation in the data center for both physical and virtual server from time to time. There are plenty of solutions in place allow blade to support virtualization today such as virtual connect from HP, pass through module, infiniband integration Xsigo, Cisco UCS and etc. This had significant resolved the I/O interfaces require per blade to host the virtualization host server. CPU and memory per blade and significant increase with the latest release from all the major server vendors, the CPU, memory and disk I/O are no longer the…
Tips to recover Snapshot problem on VM

craig

28 Jun 2009 | 9:32 am

You may had experienced the snapshot problem when the snapshot delta virtual disk had become huge which is more than 20GB and is not able to be truncated by removing all the snapshot. Usually the problem occur when the snapshot is no longer available from snapshot manager, but you can see the delta files available from the command prompt or physical folder that contain the Virtual machine images. I experienced the 2nd time now which I am not able to remove the snapshot on a particular virtual machine from snapshot manager and command prompt. The production virtual machine was powered off due…
How To Change Virtual Machine Network Adapter Manually

superman

23 Jun 2009 | 1:00 am

A virtual network adapter is a program (instead of a physical network adapter) that allows a computer to connect to a network. A virtual network adapter can also be used to connect all the computers on a local area network (LAN) to a larger network such as the Internet or a collection of LANs. Here, I would like to share how to change virtual machine virtual network adapter manually. In fact, you may know you can add a new virtual adapter and choose the adapter type from drop down menu. Here you go: 1. Login to VMware ESX server 2. Type vmware-cmd -l and look for virtual machine (vmx = vm…

NTPRO.NL
Pump Up the Volume

3 Jul 2009 | 1:02 pm

You can change virtual machine disk configurations by adding new disks, changing disk sizes, and changing virtual device node settings. Since VMware ESX 3.5 U3, it’s possible to enlarge the size of a disk while the virtual machine is powered on. When you combine this new feature with the Dell ExtPart utility, you can Extend the OS disk the easy way. The ExtPart utility provides support for online volume expansion of NTFS formatted basic disks. I recorded a little one minute demo with Jing. Ga door met lezen van "Pump Up the Volume"
VMware Technology Exchange Developer Day

3 Jul 2009 | 11:41 am

At August 31, 2009, you can join VMware's development engineers at the Moscone Center in San Francisco for the first VMware Technology Exchange Developer Day. This event is dedicated to all the developers building solutions on the VMware platforms and is co-located with VMworld 2009. As a "Developer Day", the primary focus is on helping developers integrate with VMware platforms. VMware will cover developer technologies related to all three of VMware's product areas – datacenter, desktop and cloud – in sessions and corresponding demos. A sample of topics to be covered…
Chad Sakac has beaten me

2 Jul 2009 | 11:17 pm

First of all, I would like to thank everyone who voted for NTPRO.NL in Eric Siebert's VMware Top Bloggers election. I was staying at a comfortable third place, but Chad Sakac over at Virtual Geek has beaten me. He went up from the 10th to the 3th place. Now I’m staying at the 4th place and I’m looking for revenge. :-) The almighty Duncan Epping stays at number 1 and Scott Lowe stays at number two. Finally a well deserved place for fellow VCI and friend Mike Laverick, RTFM went up from 8th pace to the 5t place. @ericsiebert over at http://vsphere-land.com/, thanks for all your efforts.

RTFM Education
The best thing I’ve found all year….

Mike Laverick

3 Jul 2009 | 11:52 am

A couple of weeks ago I was asking my buddies on Tweet what their favourite way of repartitioning disks were. You know making a partition (any partition whether it it be the C: or D: drive) larger - ideally with the fewest simplest steps. For some years I’ve been using QParted from the rather excellent [...]
A Collection of VIOPS

Mike Laverick

3 Jul 2009 | 11:29 am

If you not familiar with the very good VIOPS website run by VMware - then you should add it to your feed burner ASAP because they are pumping out some very good articles recently. This article explains covers: Splitting the vCenter Database: “A centralized model to manage VMware Infrastructure may not be suitable for some VI customers when [...]
VMware Europe 2010 to change date?

Mike Laverick

3 Jul 2009 | 8:01 am

A rummour abounds that VMworld Europe is going to change its date from its historic location (in Q2) to be just after VMworld US (Q3). I’m not quite sure about the rationale behind this - but here’s my stab. Firstly, the trip to the US has always been a financial big ask for some in [...]
VMware vSphere4 VCP4 Beta Exam

Mike Laverick

3 Jul 2009 | 7:51 am

The other day I recieved my invite to the VCP4 Beta Exam. I’ve scheduled the exam for the last day you can take it which is the 17th July. According to the invite email the real deal will be released sometime in August. I got the invite in part through being in the beta programme, [...]
The Vendor/Client Relationship…

Mike Laverick

3 Jul 2009 | 7:43 am

This video has done the rounds of the couple of virtualization blogs. But in case you missed it - here it again… It’s a humours take on the vendor/client relationship. You know if as individuals we behaved like the customers of big business did - what would be like. I get this all the time - [...]

SearchServerVirtualization Blog
Will Oracle kill Sun virtualization too?

Colin Steele

1 Jul 2009 | 5:39 am

Oracle has stopped selling Virtual Iron products, terminated its Virtual Iron reseller agreements and seen the departures of two top Virtual Iron execs. We still don’t know what Oracle’s plans are for the Virtual Iron technology it acquired in May, but in light of these developments, a much bigger question is arising about a much bigger acquisition: Will Oracle kill off Sun Microsystems’ virtualization line too? To answer this question, I did what any responsible journalist would do. I consulted the Magic 8-Ball. Its response? On one hand, the future doesn’t look good…
Red Hat turning VMworld into KVMworld?

Colin Steele

30 Jun 2009 | 12:05 pm

VMworld 2009 is still two months away, but at least one virtualization competitor is already planning to steal some thunder at the show. The Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) suite will hit general availability Sept. 1, according to LeMagIT — which, for those of you who don’t parlez francais, means “The IT Mag.” Sept. 1 is the first full day of VMworld 2009, when VMware typically makes most of its major announcements. RHEV marks a shift from Xen to KVM as Red Hat’s open source virtualization technology of choice, as senior virtualization director Navin…
Know your acronyms!

Colin Steele

23 Jun 2009 | 6:34 am

Next time you tell someone, “I’m a VCP and VMUG member who runs a next-generation COS and uses NPIV to offer a virtual HBA,” it better not be B.S. Acronym overload is an unfortunate part of life in IT, especially in virtualization. But that doesn’t mean you can toss them around willy-nilly without knowing what they mean. I came across a great reminder of this lesson this morning on FMyLife.com, the website where people share the unfortunate — and often hilarious — events that happen in their life. (The “F” stands for exactly what you think it…
VMware: Sorry for the Hyper-V crash video, Microsoft

Colin Steele

15 Jun 2009 | 11:24 am

Much has been made of Microsoft’s regular attacks against VMware, from its “VMware Costs Way Too Much” poker chips to its “Microsoft Mythbusters” video. The folks in Redmond even faced accusations that they were spreading lies about VMware last year. So why is VMware apologizing to Microsoft? Because of a video VMware posted on YouTube (since removed), which showed Microsoft Hyper-V crashing while running VMware’s VMmark platform. The video also implied that Hyper-V crashes caused April’s massive TechNet and MSDN outages. Two problems: 1) Hyper-V…
Cisco hires Christofer Hoff as virtualization director

Colin Steele

11 Jun 2009 | 1:29 pm

Cisco Systems has a new virtualization and cloud computing director: Christofer Hoff, the security and virtualization expert and popular blogger. Hoff, aka “Beaker,” runs the Rational Survivability blog and has held high-ranking security positions at several IT vendors and other firms — albeit none as big as Cisco. They include Unisys, Crossbeam Systems and the WesCorp federal credit union. His hiring at Cisco comes as the networking giant is making its move into the virtualization and data center markets with its Unified Computing System. UCS aims to unite computing,…

vinternals
Detect Virtual Hardware Version From Within the Guest

stu

25 Jun 2009 | 4:55 pm

Like most enterprises, we wrap up VMware tools with our own logic and install transforms… y’know, stuff like setting the video hardware acceleration level in the VM before running the tools installer so you don’t get pop-ups, not installing the hgfs driver, etc etc. The problem when a new version of tools comes out (ie along [...]
VMware Studio 2.0 – Public Beta Out Next Monday!

stu

24 Jun 2009 | 1:24 pm

The latest installment of the VMware Coffee Talk Webinars was today, covering off the soon to be released VMware Studio 2.0. But the amount of change and feature enhancements that have gone into this new version, it could seriously skip a few numbers and go straight to 6.0 or something – it’s a _massive_ release, [...]
Why Are So Many Orchestration Tools Developer Focused?

stu

22 Jun 2009 | 2:19 pm

This is something that has quietly been boiling away in the depths of the cavern of my mind for a while now – why is it that all the big name orchestration tools on the market (currently) target developers? You need to know Javascript if you want to do anything interesting with VMware vCenter Orchestrator, [...]
Rethinking the Guest

stu

24 May 2009 | 2:02 pm

With the arrival of vSphere 4.0, it’s a good time to revisit your guest standards. Not just what virtual hardware and resource allocations you use by default, but also what standard software you deploy into the guest. Virtualisation has been labelled a game changing technology, but when most people talk of this, they refer to [...]
Yeehhh Iii, Oohhh, I’m Still Alive…

stu

23 May 2009 | 3:25 am

And so is my PC, after suffering a fatal power supply failure a few days ago. Hence I couldn’t put up the obligatory “vSphere 4 GA” post on the 21st . Oh well. I’ll try and make up for the lack of content of late with a return to the Sunday Afternoon Architecture and [...]

Virtualfuture.info
Change Microcode in Xenserver/Everrun

Wouter Heije

3 Jul 2009 | 9:22 am

Up until today I even didn’t know what Microcode or whatit’s purpose was. After today I’ve learned a lot about it and would like to share it with you. ”Microcode is a layer of lowest-level instructions involved in the implementation of machine codeinstructions in many computers and other processors” is the description from Wikipedia. I read more [...]
Know what you’re talking about : get a free hyper-v training

Matthijs Haverink

1 Jul 2009 | 1:52 am

As a technical consultant and VMware enthousiast I’m very often evangalizing the power and beauty of VMware and it’s products but I also have to face it that Microsoft’s share in the Hardware Virtualization space is growing. I have to know what I’m talking about when suggesting that VMware has the best solution for a [...]
VMware CodeCentral Blog : Administrators heaven ?

Matthijs Haverink

24 Jun 2009 | 1:52 am

Maybe you were already familiar with it but the VMware Communities host a part that’s called VMware Code Central. It’s what supposed to grow to VI/VS administrators heaven I guess. It’s a collection of VI 3 and vSphere 4 sample codes (PowerCli/Perl SDK) for regular administrator tasks like Backing up VM’s, Making reports, Resource Pool Calculations [...]
VMware ThinApp 4.0.3 released

Sven Huisman

23 Jun 2009 | 12:57 pm

Last week, VMware released a minor update for VMware ThinApp: 4.0.3. Here are the release notes: What’s New The 4.0.3 release adds the ObjectTypes parameter to the Package.ini file. You can use this parameter to specify a list of virtual COM objects that are visible to other applications in the physical environment. The 4.0.3 release changed the name [...]
HOWTO manage HP P400 RAID controller in a vSphere whitebox

Sven Huisman

23 Jun 2009 | 12:22 pm

A while ago I posted an article about my ESX whitebox and the HP P400 RAID controller I use in this whitebox server. At that time, I used ESXi 3.5 and there was no way I could configure or get the status from the RAID controller. Fortunately, someone commented that it was possible when using [...]

VirtualizationAdmin Blogs
What are companies spending on M&A in the Virtualization space?

Jason Conger

30 Jun 2009 | 12:44 pm

Back in 2007, Citrix acquired XenSource for a reported $500 million. A lot of people at the time either thought that was lunacy or brilliance. I remember someone asking Doug Brown about what he thought of the purchase during Citrix iForum 2008. Doug didn't skip a beat when he answered, "I think it is the best $500 million Citrix could have ever spent on marketing." I can 100% agree with that statement because any time an article or news source mentions VMware, Citrix XenServer is mentioned too. more...
Application Virtualizaiton Overview and Feature Matrix

Jason Conger

30 Jun 2009 | 11:42 am

The vendor landscape for application virtualization has continued to grow. The question a lot of people have when trying to choose a vendor in the application virtualization space is "which vendor is the best fit for my organization?". The answer to this question is naturally "it depends". more...
VMware releases VMware View Reference Architecture Kit

Jason Conger

30 Jun 2009 | 11:31 am

VMware recently made a VMware View Reference Architecture kit available for download. This reference architecture kit is contains papers written by VMware and supporting partners to serve as a guide to assist in the architectural design of large-scale VMware View based solutions. more...
Oracle snuffs out Virtual Iron after buying them

Jason Conger

30 Jun 2009 | 11:25 am

Just last month, software giant Oracle purchased Virtual Iron. Apparently, Oracle only wanted pieces of the company (like the VM management) as Oracle has killed the brand by firing all but 10 Virtual Iron employees. Also, just this week, Oracle has closed the Virtual Iron reseller channel. It is yet to be seen how much of the Virtual Iron IP will be integrated into Oracle's Oracle VM offering. more...
How to: Convert VMware Windows VMs to Citrix XenServer VMs

Jason Conger

29 Jun 2009 | 7:40 am

Now that Citrix XenServer 5.5 is free, a lot of people want to try it out to see if it can fill some of their virtualization needs. One of the strategies I have seen for people running VMware shops is to migrate some smaller workloads from VMware to XenServer. This gives them a nice introduction and way to compare functionality and performance. more...

Blogs
Thin Provisioning: Under Control

30 Jun 2009 | 1:34 pm

Should the storage system or the virtualization platform be in control when thin provisioning? Your thoughts...
Storage Sizing with VMFS Volumes

29 Jun 2009 | 12:00 am

There is no clear answer, but there are strategies.
Type 1 and Type 2 Hypervisors Explained

24 Jun 2009 | 1:52 pm

Important distinction necessary for understanding of broader virtualization landscape.
Oracle Kills Virtual Iron

22 Jun 2009 | 9:25 am

Another strange chapter in Oracle's developing virtualization story.
Thin-Provisioned Disk Monitoring Critical with vSphere

22 Jun 2009 | 12:00 am

New feature is a change for storage administration for virtual environments.

Security, Compliance and Best Practices
Trust doesn’t come easy

Dwayne Melancon

29 Jun 2009 | 12:57 pm

I’ve been speaking with a number of virtualization pros lately and a couple of recurring threads have popped out of the discussion: Many virtualization admins are concerned about reputation (their own and the reputation of virtualization as a platform) within their companies; These same admins are often the “go-to guy” around virtual infrastructure and haven’t yet built a strong enough team around them where they’re comfortable enough to delegate what they do; They don’t have the cycles to spend much “quality time” with their team, so it’s pretty tough to break this cycle.
Who’s to blame when a breach occurs to a PCI compliant company?

Ed Rarick

18 Jun 2009 | 7:16 pm

In a recent article — In Legal First, Data-Breach Suit Targets Auditor — Kim Zetter reported that PCI auditor Savvis Inc is being sued because it had certified CardSystems Solutions as being PCI compliant just 3 months before 263,000 card numbers were stolen from their system, and nearly 40 million numbers were compromised. Is Savvis to blame? Does CardSystems Solutions have some responsibility to maintain a PCI compliant state “after the audit”? These are tough questions that, in my view, belong in the Boardroom rather than the Courtroom. PCI DSS is very prescriptive for best…
Introducing vWire – a Tripwire Creation

mhixson

15 Jun 2009 | 4:46 pm

On June 9, 2009 Tripwire officially embarked on a new adventure – vWire. vWire is a product built from the ground up to inspire confidence in the virtualization professional by giving him the virtualization management tools that he needs. This is something that a team of people within Tripwire have been dedicated to over the last 8-10 months. If you are reading this and are a Tripwire Enterprise customer don’t worry – Tripwire is actually investing more in TE than they ever have. We just happen to be doing some new things also. Virtualization is a market…
Conference Report: ISACA North America CACS: “Wow, we’re not in Vegas anymore…”

Gene Kim

18 May 2009 | 3:13 pm

I’ve always loved the ISACA CACS conferences. Why? I guess because I love auditors. Not all auditors, mind you, but auditors that have a risk-based orientation, and who understand that the achievement of any goal (regardless of whether we’re talking about information security, operating effectiveness, or compliance goals) hinge on effective controls. And IT auditors congregate at the fantastic ISACA conferences and chapter events. It’s one of the few conferences that have a good balance of IT risk and business risk. I don’t know of any other conference where…
Conference Report: Infosecurity Europe: “What Recession?”

Gene Kim

18 May 2009 | 2:30 pm

A couple of weeks ago, I gave three talks at the Infosecurity Europe conference in London, which was held on April 27-29. I was pleasantly surprised to see how well-attended it was. No, that’s an understatement. It was a packed conference. Based on attendance, you’d be forgiven if you thought it was 1999, during the middle of the dot-com boom. Image courtesy: gem66/Flickr Oh, wait. We are in the middle of the security/compliance boom! IMHO, this is made more amazing that it landed in the middle of one of most capital-starved periods for IT in nearly a decade. If you…

VIRTUALIZATION PRO
The votes are in: Favorite vSphere enhancements

Eric Siebert

1 Jul 2009 | 8:13 am

Now that users have started using vSphere, I wanted to know which new technologies in the latest ESX platform release are most popular. I ran two polls on my website, and the survey results are in: Thin provisioning is the favorite new major enhancement and alarm improvements are the favorite smaller enhancement. Both features existed in VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3) but were very limited and difficult to use. In VI3, thin provisioning could only be used when creating virtual disks via the command-line interface, but in vSphere it is fully integrated into the vSphere client, which makes…
Virtualizing Microsoft SQL? Consider per-processor licensing

Rick Vanover

1 Jul 2009 | 7:26 am

In a recent SearchVMware.com tip, I outlined situations where it does not make sense to have SQL or Exchange virtualized. The bottom line is that licencing depends on many factors, and you need to consider licencing when virtualizing such applications or you could end up spending more money than necessary. One point worth noting that is not in the tip is if you opt to license Microsoft SQL Server per-processor, it may carry additional benefits. The trick is to provide a VMware-based dedicated cluster, and license all processors in that cluster for SQL processor licensing. At that…
Three ways to kill a frozen vSphere ESXi host virtual machine

Eric Siebert

30 Jun 2009 | 2:03 pm

At some point, you may need to know how to kill a stuck or frozen VMware vSphere 4.0 ESXi host virtual machine when the traditional power controls do not work. As with VMware ESX, there are several methods, which I covered in a previous post, killing a virtual machine (VM) on a VMware ESX host in vSphere. The methods for ESXi are very similar to that of ESX, but the execution is different as ESXi doesn’t have a service console like ESX’s. The methods below are listed in order of usage preference, beginning with using normal VM commands and ending with a brute force method.
More details on VMware’s Fault Tolerance feature

Eric Siebert

25 Jun 2009 | 8:35 am

This week’s VMTN Community Roundtable podcast was about Fault Tolerance (FT). Henry Robinson and Karen Ritter of VMware joined to provide information about the development and future of FT. Here’s a summary of some interesting details from the podcast, but if you haven’t listened to it yet, I recommend that you check out the recording as it provides a lot of valuable technical information. VMware spent a lot of time working with Intel/AMD to refine their physical processors so VMware could implement its vLockstep technology, which replicates non-deterministic transactions…
Killing a frozen VM on a vSphere ESX host

Eric Siebert

23 Jun 2009 | 8:34 am

Occasionally virtual machines (VMs) get stuck in a zombie state and will not respond to a power-off command using the traditional vSphere client power controls. Rebooting a host will fix this condition — but rebooting is usually not an option. Fortunately, there are a few methods for forcing the VM to shut down without rebooting the host. I previously documented these methods with VMware Infrastructure 3 (VI3) and wanted to make sure they all worked with vSphere. The methods below are listed in order of usage preference starting with using normal VM commands and ending with a brute…

Virtually Speaking
DataCore Advanced Site Recovery

Dan Kusnetzky

2 Jul 2009 | 3:00 am

It’s been quite a while since I last spoke with the folks from DataCore. I believe that the last post on this company was back in August 2008 (see Datacore - nothing but storage.) Last time the discussion focused on the need organizations should recognize to pair virtual storage solutions with their virtual processing solutions. [...]
FireFox 3.5, Add-ons and Backwards Compatibility

Dan Kusnetzky

1 Jul 2009 | 3:06 am

On a whim, I updated one of my systems from Firefox 3.0.11 to 3.5 yesterday. I wanted to personally experience the speed improvements that industry reports have said Firefox 3.5 provided over previous versions. After working with the software for a short time, I have to agree that the browser seems more responsive and Web [...]
Sun VirtualBox 3.0

Dan Kusnetzky

30 Jun 2009 | 3:00 am

Sun Microsystems released VirtualBox 3.0 today. One goal of this release is supporting workloads, such as database management systems, some collaborative applications and many web-based applications that rely on multiple processes running simultaneously. Another is offering support for high performance graphics for desktop applications. Here’s what Sun has to say about this release. Sun Microsystems, Inc. (NASDAQ: [...]
Platform Computing: Herding Clouds

Dan Kusnetzky

29 Jun 2009 | 3:00 am

After the post Platform Computing Announces Infrastructure Sharing Services appeared on ZDnet, I had the opportunity to speak with Songnian Zhou, CEO of Platform Computing. Although the plans were for me to speak with Platform prior to the post going live, scheduling problems made that impossible. So, the focus of our conversation moved from the [...]
MokaFive launches version 2 of its MokaFive Suite

Dan Kusnetzky

25 Jun 2009 | 3:00 am

Desktop virtualization (the combination of access virtualization, application virtualization and/or processing virtualization for client-side deployment) has not gotten the intense industry attention that its cousin, server virtualization, has and yet, a number of suppliers have pegged their hopes and dreams to that nascent market. MokaFive is one of those suppliers. I’ve posted about MokaFive on [...]

VM /ETC
VMware Studio 2.0 and OVF Exports: Blurred Products or Outside The Box Thinking?

Rich

1 Jul 2009 | 3:49 pm

VMware has recently announced the public availability of the VMware Studio 2.0 Beta, a tool to create virtual appliances and distribute them in OVF format, and today’s VMTN Roundtable Podcast provided a lot of discussion about the possible scenarios for using this new version. I’m still struggling to get my mind around the potential of Studio 2.0, but I did come away from today’s podcast with a few ideas that make me think I have either blurred the functions of several existing products or I have suddenly realized there may be some great “outside the box” use…
If it’s not Blog Syndication or Aggregation then it’s Stealing and Aggravating

Rich

27 Jun 2009 | 6:54 am

[updated 06.29.09] - The owner of the site has professionally responded in the commnents following this post. I appreciate the reply and this exercise has made me to decide to investigate providing multiple RSS feeds for VM /ETC. To the owner(s) of networkvirtualization.com: Change the current method of publishing protected vmetc.com content to a more acceptable style of blog aggregation, contact me to arrange a syndication agreement, or take down any and all of my content from your site. Based on Scott Lowe’s post I Love Having My Content Stolen and the consistent reaction in both…
Microsoft Adds Quick Storage Migration Feature to SCVMM

Rich

25 Jun 2009 | 12:16 pm

Edwin Yuen, Microsoft Virtualization Team Senior Technical Product Manager, has introduced Hyper-V’s latest feature closely emulating VMware’s virtual infrastructure enterprise product offerings. Quick Storage Migration (QSM) is being added to System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2. SCVMM 2008 R2 Release Canidate was recently released to the public. Hyper-V’s final release was integrated in Windows Server 2008 SP2. Quoting Yuen’s post on the Microsoft Virtualization Team Blog titled System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 - Quick Storage Migration,…
PHD Technologies Adds Patch Downloader To List of Free VMware Utilities

Rich

25 Jun 2009 | 9:20 am

PHD Virtual added their latest VMware utility to it’s ever growing list of free tools for virtualization administrators. Patch Downloader 6.0 is best described as a tool that will “ease the pain” for dowloading ESX 3.X patches in environments without vCenter Update Manager (VUM). Designed to filter the list of ESX patches available by selecting the desired version of ESX/ESXi, Patch Downloader enables the administrator to review individual patch classifications and instructions. Patches are then easily downloaded to a configured repository where they are ready to be manually…
VMware Code Central: New Community to Share Scripts

Rich

23 Jun 2009 | 8:00 pm

I was notified by Nava Davuluri of VMware Product Marketing that a new VMTN community site and blog has been created for the purpose of centrally organizing freely available VMware product scripting and code samples. In Davuluri’s words: “These sample codes are related to products such as the new vSphereCLI, vCLI, Perl toolkit, Java Webservices SDK, etc. I’m trying to involve the entire developer community in using(sharing/contributing) this site more.“ On the VMware Code Central Blog he explains Code Central “is intended for VMware community developers and…

Mike D's Blog
Virtual Iron Dies a Horrible Death

Mike DiPetrillo

25 Jun 2009 | 8:29 am

It seems every time I’m in an account and finish talking about VMware’s cloud strategy and ecosystem Oracle comes up as a discussion point. Customers ask why Oracle seems to be going in the complete opposite direction of their strategic directions and cloud in general. I don’t have a good answer for that one other than to agree with them. Take the announcement from earlier last week that Oracle is killing off Virtual Iron shortly after the acquisition. It’s yet another virtualization technology they bought and have subsequently killed (SUN xVM being the other). This is…
Vendors and Customers in the Real World

Mike DiPetrillo

1 Jun 2009 | 7:20 am

OK. So maybe you have to be in sales to really understand the humor in this one. Still, in this economy this is only getting worse. Enjoy the humor post and I promise to start blogging more about cloud soon. I just got back from 18 days in EMEA talking to a lot of our hosting partners that are now getting into the cloud game. Exciting times!
DMTF – Open Cloud Standards Incubator

Mike DiPetrillo

4 May 2009 | 7:05 am

On April 27, the DMTF launched the Open Cloud Standards Incubator. The goal as described by the DMTF press release is as follows: The work of the Open Cloud Standards Incubator will focus on ways to facilitate operations between private clouds within enterprises and other private, public, or hybrid clouds by improving the interoperability between platforms through open cloud resource management standards. The group also aims to develop specifications to enable cloud service portability and provide management consistency across cloud and enterprise platforms. The Open Cloud Standards Incubator…
May 2 – Shut Everything Down

Mike DiPetrillo

22 Apr 2009 | 5:46 pm

I came across an interesting site today for an event called “Shutdown Day“. Shutdown Day announces the Annual 2009 Campaign. Just like in years past, Shutdown Day 2009 calls on every net obsessed, computer–addicted individual to SHUT DOWN their computers for 24 hours on May 2, 2009 and do something else! New, Shutdown Day 2009 will be promoting several organizations that help young people suffering from computer addiction. A bunch of events are also organized for May 2, 2009, so stay tuned and watch this space. I find this to be an interesting concept. Personally on May 2,…
Time to Upgrade

Mike DiPetrillo

22 Apr 2009 | 7:55 am

So you’ve recovered from rolling on the floor laughing at the launch video for vSphere. You know, the one with the engineers running around the world with the gold CD. I thought it was awesome. You also finished reading my pumped up blog post to convince you to upgrade to vSphere. What’s next. Well, now it’s time to do some planning and see what’s involved in this new major release. Thank goodness we have some awesome SEs in the company and one of them created a whole bunch of upgrade videos to walk you through the process. There’s even an entire site dedicated…

Win7 #auTechED
INTERVIEW: Jeff Alexander, 7 questions on how?

dugie

3 Jul 2009 | 4:39 pm

Hi Guys, meet Jeff Alexander. Jeff is bloke who has the [enviable] task of getting Windows 7 out onto all our Netbooks!! Jeff was kind enough to take a few moments after his Windows 7 Deployment livemeeting yesterday to stop and answer a couple of questions for me. For those who don’t know Jeff, he is Microsoft Australia’s, IT Pro Evangelist. He’s been working with Windows, since before it was cool — Anyone out there remember "Interface Manager" =) (For more about Jeff, have a squizz at Long’s post “Jeff’s 20th Anniversary” or Jeff’s…
Getting wireless to the people

dugie

1 Jul 2009 | 4:55 am

It appears, that hosting geek Jorke, has already started getting the wireless plumbing reading for TechED Australia this year. According to his twitter feed, there was a [secret?] visit to the Gold Coast Convention Center back in May to check things out. Anyway Jorke has just recently posted some more info on his blog. It looks like the lads have been busy, and already started a Wireless Survey of the up and coming TechED site. You can read more in his post “Tech.Ed 2009 Windows 7 Experience – Netbooks for you!”, and a snippet is below: Now we go into the fun part of getting…
INTERVIEW: Nick Hodge on 7 questions why?

dugie

30 Jun 2009 | 6:21 pm

I had a chance this morning to spend a few moments with Microsoft Australia’s, Nick Hodge. Nick is “the man” who is organising the logistical challenge of getting 2,000+ netbooks into the hands of all us Tech•Ed attendees. …to put that in perspective that’s roughly 58x forklift palettes =) Anyway, In the spirit of Windows 7, I asked Nick 7x questions on who/why/where etc, and his answers are below the fold. The burning question: Why? Why do us Aussies get to something as cool as this, when our [jealous] counterparts in the USA didn’t? And why…
The story so far (speedlinking)

dugie

30 Jun 2009 | 5:04 pm

Super Blogger Long Zheng broke the news in his post "TechEd Australia attendees to receive free HP Mini Notebook with Win7 ", and shortly after twitter went crazy (check the hashtag auteched), a snippet from Long’s Post is below: If any Aussies out there wasn’t entirely sure of going to the Microsoft TechEd Australia conference on the Gold Coast this year or not, then here’s an offer to nitro-boost your thought process a little. Microsoft Australia is going to be hosting the largest hands-on Windows 7 evaluation in the world by offering each paying attendee with one of…
Welcome to Win7 #auTechED

dugie

10 Jun 2009 | 8:26 pm

Hi There Guys, thanks for dropping by. Well as you may have heard, Microsoft TechED Australia is giving each delegate a complimentary HP Mini 2140 Notebook PC pre-loaded with Windows 7. Here is a informal (and unofficial) blog by a couple of guys, to keep the TechED community abreast of information as we find it. Keep you posted as we find out more!

Yellow Bricks
vSphere and vmfs-undelete

Duncan Epping

3 Jul 2009 | 3:15 am

This week someone asked me during the VMTN Podcast on chat if I knew where vmfs-undelete resided in vSphere. I had a look but couldn’t find it either. A quick search gave me this: vmfs-undelete utility is not available for ESX/ESXi 4.0 ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 3 included a utility called vmfs-undelete, which could be used to recover deleted .vmdk files. This utility is not available with ESX/ESXi 4.0. Workaround: None. Deleted .vmdk files cannot be recovered. So if you are currently actively using vmfs-undelete and looking into upgrading to vSphere take this in account! This post originally…
And the winners of the VMware top blog are…

Duncan Epping

2 Jul 2009 | 8:29 pm

Eric Siebert just published the new TOP 10 Blogs. I want to thank every one who voted for me. I’m really surprised with the number of “#1″ votes I got. As you might notice compared to Eric’s own TOP-20 some people have moved up or down. I think the most noticeable is Gabe entering the TOP 10 and Chad going from 10th place to 3rd, but that’s well deserved in my opinion! [update: Eric just tweeted 11 - 20 so I added these to the list] Yellow Bricks – Duncan Epping(1) – 102 first place votes – weighted score of 991 Scott Lowe’s Blog – Scott…
ftCLI.pl – VMware Fault Tolerance Management

Duncan Epping

1 Jul 2009 | 12:04 pm

William Lam did it again. He created a script that manages FT from the command line. The script is called ftCLI.pl and here are the details: Description: Managing VMware Fault Tolerance via the command line. Params: The following operations are supported: create|enable|disable|stop Requirement: vSphere vCenter 4.0 ESX(i) 4.0 Advanced, Enterprise, Enterprise Plus or Eval licensing Assumption: Your environment is FT capable and is configured properly I think it speaks for itself. If you are a command line guy this is really useful! Great work William, keep it up! Just head over to the VMTN…
Yellow Bricks wallpaper!

Duncan Epping

29 Jun 2009 | 11:35 am

I was looking for a new wallpaper for my laptop as the old ones started to bore me. Coincidentally I ran into Sander Ras this week. Sander designed the Yellow Bricks logo almost two years ago, and I asked him if he could create a wallpaper for me based on this logo. This is what he emailed me and I really liked them so I wanted to share them with you: This post originally appeared on Yellow-Bricks.com, author: Duncan Epping. Support Yellow-Bricks.com: save 10% on select VMware Products!Learn how to fully utilize VMware products with Train Signal!Follow me on Twitter and add Yellow-Bricks.com…
Standalone vSphere hosts and the local VMFS

Duncan Epping

29 Jun 2009 | 4:09 am

On twitter @lamw just asked a question which triggered me to blog it cause I expect this is something more people will run into sooner or later. Anyone know if you can change the default VMFS block size in ESX4 during interactive installation? This is something that I also ran into personally a couple of weeks ago. If you install ESX 4.0 with the defaults a large VMFS volume is created that fills up the disk. This VMFS volume has a default block size of 1MB which means a file size limit of 256GB. In the setup there’s currently no way of changing the block size. (If I’m wrong…

CohesiveFT Elastic-Server
Cloud Computing Webinar June 30th

Ryan Koop

26 Jun 2009 | 5:19 am

On Tuesday June 30th, Simone Brunozzi of Amazon Web Services, Michael Crandell and Edward Goldberg of RightScale, and our own Patrick Kerpan will be presenting the live webinar How to Create Secure Test and Dev Environments on the Cloud. Unlike other vapor-ware presentations that seem to be the norm in the extremely crowded cloud computing space. This webinar will cover products and practices that are being used by our customers now and are available today. Tired of hand waving and and promises of future release dates? It's time to get real. If you are interested we can show you…
The Difference Between Like and Love

Ryan Koop

18 Jun 2009 | 10:17 am

We see it all the time on ElasticServer.com. Take a look at our QuickTip Videos to learn how the Elastic Server Factory can make you react to custom virtual or cloud servers the same way you would to your favorite sports team or celebutant.Cheers.
VPN-Cubed IPsec to EC2 Announced

Ryan Koop

3 Jun 2009 | 9:00 am

WARNING CAPITAL LETTERS AHEAD!CohesiveFT has always been about YOU our customer. All of our products and services have been built with one word in mind YOU. It's YOUR software stack, YOUR data center, YOUR cloud computing project, who are we to tell you how to run your business? Our most recent product release, VPN-Cubed IPsec to EC2 Edition, was brought to market with your interests in mind. We found that while many enterprises were extremely comfortable installing our VPN-Cubed Manager Virtual Appliances in their data centers, some were reluctant to install new software or didn't have the…
Now THIS is loosely coupled automation infrastructure!

Patrick Kerpan

19 May 2009 | 12:43 am

The Elastic Server team recently announced the ability to use the ES Factory to assemble and deploy images to Eucalyptus Clouds and has been working with some trial users on our test platform. Last week it was released to our production site. 2pm: Released to production2:07pm Inbound "contact me" email from our website: Name: "new euca guy" Email: "new euca guy"@gmail.com Subject: Eucalyptus Deployment Request Message: I wanted to enable my cloud with your service.2:30pm One of our team points this person to the page in ES where you enter your Eucalyptus Credentials to connect to a Eucalyptus…
Securing your Elastic Server

Ryan Koop

14 May 2009 | 8:59 am

A server by any other name is still a server. At the end of the day a virtual server is just a server, and an Elastic Server is no different: we just fill it with more goodness. And like a bare-metal server, it needs to be secured against the bad guys.How much you'll want to secure your Elastic Server depends on your requirements, opinions and philosophies for security. Some people might be comfortable with running SSH openly, including allowing root access, other people will lock everything down so tightly you'd need direct access to break in.The purpose of this document is to give some…

VMware Videos.com
Running VMware ESXi 4 / vSphere in VMware Workstation – VIDEO

David Davis

22 Jun 2009 | 3:36 pm

Here is a video sample from my upcoming VMware vSphere video training course. In this 18 minute video, you will learn how to run VMware ESXi version 4 / vSphere inside VMware Workstation. If you like the video please comment and feel free to use the embed code to embed this video on your blog!
VIDEO: VMware ESXi Server Installation Checklist

David Davis

17 Jun 2009 | 8:09 am

In my latest video, I cover the steps that you should follow on a new VMware ESXi server, to get it up and running and properly configured. Learn how to do it, step by step, in this video…
Awesome New Book – VMware VI3 Implementation and Administration by Eric Siebert

David Davis

2 Jun 2009 | 1:36 pm

As you can see from the photo, I just received my copy of Eric Siebert’s new book – VMware VI3 Implementation and Administration. I got an early chance to read part of this book and offer a quote for the praise page. Here’s what I had to say about it: “I have read hundreds of articles by Eric Siebert and always wished that I could have it in a single book. That wish has finally come true. In Eric’s VMware VI Implementation and Administration book, he covers VI up and down, inside and out, like only Eric can. It’s the ultimate VMware VI manual.” I was impressed with…
VMWare CTO Stephen Herrod Demos vSphere dvSwitch at Interop

David Davis

28 May 2009 | 7:49 am

In this CNET video, VMWare CTO Stephen Herrod Demos vSphere dvSwitch at Interop 2008 in Las Vegas. After Stephen, Rob Noth of VMWare demonstrates the Cisco command line – Great Video!
How can the free vWire OpsCheck help with your VMotion Configuration?

David Davis

19 May 2009 | 8:04 am

My latest article covers the the free vWire OpsCheck tool. With this tool, you can verify that your VMotion configuration is correct. Without that verification, you could attempt a VMotion and it could fail. Read the full article and learn where to download it at: How can the free vWire OpsCheck help with your VMotion Configuration?

VMware Tips
Invitation to the VMware Certified Professional on vSphere 4 Beta Exam

Rick Scherer

2 Jul 2009 | 5:17 am

This morning I wake up to find an e-mail from the VMware Certification department, inviting me to take the VCP4 Beta Exam. This is pretty exciting, yet it disappoints me because it reminds me that I still have not received my VCDX Design Exam Beta results (going on 3 months now). However, I did talk to Tina at VMware on Tuesday and she sounded hopeful that these results will be available sometime in July. It looks like the General Release exam will become available in August, based on the information provided in the e-mail from VMware; Dear Rick, VMware is proud to announce the availability…
VMware Code Central - Now Online

Rick Scherer

25 Jun 2009 | 5:18 pm

I’m a couple days behind on this, been extremely busy at work getting ready to go live with our SAP Deployment on July 2nd. Anyways, enough crying to you about my busy schedule. Nava Davuluri wanted me to help get the word out about the new VMware Sample Code website (titled Code Central). This will be a site dedicated to the developer community, sample codes related to products such as the new vSphere CLI, vCLI, Perl Toolkit, Java Webservices SDK and much much more. Check out the site today for great code from other bloggers such as Eric Sloof and Alan Renouf! Also be sure to…
VMware vSphere 4 - Enterprise Plus - 2 Month SnS

Rick Scherer

25 Jun 2009 | 4:55 pm

A big issue for companies making the upgrade to vSphere 4 Enterprise Plus from their existing VI3 Enterprise License wasn’t the low $295 price per CPU (VMware Part VS4-ENT-ENT-PL-UG-PROMO), it was the hassle of having to renew their SnS Entitlement! What if your company just renewed their 1 Year Enterprise SnS? You’d basically need to purchase another 1 Year Enterprise Plus SnS. Even though it would push out your support another year, this additional cost could be quite high for some companies, especially if you have dozens or even hundreds of hosts! Customers complained and…
Run it with VMware - Video Contest

Rick Scherer

16 Jun 2009 | 7:52 am

Hey everyone, my marketing contact at VMware informed me of a video contest that they are putting on for VMworld 2009. The grand prize is $5000 cash and four other lucky people will win $1000 cash. Not to mention the fact that the 5 will be played at VMworld and the crowd favorite will win an additional $1000! So you better enter now, entries must be received by July 20th, 2009. Even if you do not win, you do get a cool Run it with VMware T-Shirt. The only down-side I see is that you must be a US Resident. Contest Name: Run It with VMware Contest Website: www.vmware.com/go/runitwithvmware…
VMworld 2009 - TA2259 Ask the Experts Panel Session

Rick Scherer

12 Jun 2009 | 1:43 pm

I am proud to officially announce the VMworld 2009 - Ask the Experts Panel Session. This session will feature virtualization experts Rick Scherer, Scott Lowe, Duncan Epping, Chad Sakac and Tom Howarth answering your questions on virtual infrastructure design. In the next week or so we will be posting sections on our blog sites for you to submit questions for review during the session, so stay tuned! Session ID: TA2259 Session Title: Ask the Experts - Virtualization Design Track: Technology and Architecture Abstract: Are you running a virtual environment and experiencing some problems? …

Citrix XenServer
Cloud Bridge

Craig Ellrod

30 Jun 2009 | 2:53 pm

Cloud Networking is fast You can create a complete end-to-end network from the datacenter to the cloud. All cloud servers communicate securely over SSL VPN. Between the datacenter and the Amazon EC2 cloud is a site-to-site SSL VPN built with Vyatta. On the XenApp server in the cloud runs the Citrix Accelerator which connects back to the Citrix Branch Repeater/WANScaler at the datacenter, to accelerate data connections. The Citrix Accelerator makes cloud computing fast, Vyatta makes it secure. The reason for using Vyatta site-to-site SSL VPN between the datacenter and Amazon EC2 cloud is there…
XenServer tip how to maximize work space for vm consoles

Ruiguo Yang

29 Jun 2009 | 7:20 am

If you are like me running a 1280 x 1024 display resolution, you may have run into the issue of displaying a virtual machine console at 1024 x 768 display resolution inside XenCenter. Even when XenCenter is maximized I still have to use virtual and horizontal scroll bars when working on a virtual machine console. It's inconvenient to use. Here is the screen shot. I found a solution today. After I hide the toolbar and adjust the width of the left column, the VM console can be used without relying on scroll bars. Here is the screen shot. To disable toolbar, go to View menu and uncheck ToolBar…
Meet the other Citrix Technology Professionals - You!

Rich Crusco

28 Jun 2009 | 2:30 pm

Find and meet up with other Citrix Technology Professionals like yourself who are interested in personal collaboration, creating a Citrix Community, or hosting a Citrix User Group. MeetUp is a site dedicated to getting people to meet. How does it work? You have an interest, Citrix, find a local group, and meet up with people who share in your interest of Citrix. You can either start a meet up or you can find people who have started a meet up in your area or the world if you wish. You can also go to http://citrix.meetup.com to Find Citrix Users and Citrix MeetUps near you... Here is a map…
Citrix Delivery Center Demonstration at SAP -- Part II

Bhumik Patel

22 Jun 2009 | 9:22 am

In the first part of this blog series we looked at specific details on Citrix Delivery Center and the Disaster Recovery demonstration for SAP NetWeaver. In this posting we will cover different High Availability solutions also demonstrated at SAP. In addition to this blog series, please refer the Reference Architecture document that provides all the technical details about Citrix and Marathon solutions implemented for SAP. Getting back to High Availability, Citrix XenServer and Marathon Technologies everRun VM for XenServer provide solutions that covers a broad spectrum of High Availability…

VCritical
VMware vSphere 4 has a Snapshot Alarm

Eric Gray

25 Jun 2009 | 11:16 am

Snapshots have always been a powerful feature of VMware ESX — even in production deployments. There are tons of innovative tools and scripts out there to monitor snapshots — just check out this new one from Virtu-Al. If you happen to want a simple, built-in way to monitor your snapshots in VMware vSphere 4, look no further than this new alarm: Very nice addition. This article written by Eric Gray for VCritical, © 2009 • VCritical Site Index Read more about ESX, snapshots, storage, vCenter, vSphere One comment • Subscribe to RSS • Add to del.icio.us • Follow me on…
Hyper-V deployments suddenly drop to zero

Eric Gray

18 Jun 2009 | 11:04 am

In recent months, we have seen the Microsoft Virtualization team release some pretty amazing statistics about Hyper-V downloads. First, at MMS 2009 David Greshler claimed one million Hyper-V RTM downloads. More recently– and it’s really unclear why these stats differ so greatly — Jeff Woolsey has been throwing around 750,000+ as the number of downloads whenever he has a chance. If you need a quick refresher on what they mean by downloads, please review The Milion Hypervisor March article. In a nutshell, Microsoft Virtualization decided to get creative with the metric…
Vote VCritical — for change

Eric Gray

17 Jun 2009 | 3:45 pm

Eric Siebert is soliciting feedback from the community as he prepares to update the top 20 blogs on his VMware vLaunchPad. That means virtualization blog campaign season is here. But, unlike those multi-year federal campaigns, this one is short — just two weeks. The candidates are out virtually knocking on doors — Duncan Epping, Eric Sloof, Rich Brambley, and several others are already campaigning for your vote. Friends, if you have not voted yet, won’t you consider a vote for VCritical? There are still plenty of important positions available in the VCritical cabinet…
Choose any two: Hyper-V, HA, Linux

Eric Gray

12 Jun 2009 | 10:58 am

Everyone knows that Hyper-V is a great platform for running your Linux workloads — as long as the distribution you need just happens to be the ONE that Hyper-V supports. Yes, someday there will be two… patience, patience. You have probably also heard over and over about Hyper-V and High Availability (HA) virtual machines. And please, don’t forget — HA is free! Should one conclude that a supported Linux VM on Hyper-V would be fully functional in an HA configuration? No, one should not. Hyper-V HA is based on Microsoft’s general purpose Failover Clustering…
DHCP VMkernel port in VMware ESX 4

Eric Gray

11 Jun 2009 | 3:20 pm

Have you noticed that VMware ESX 4 now provides an option to use DHCP for a VMkernel port? Using DHCP is probably not going to be a best practice for most environments, but it sure is convenient for quick, temporary vSphere setups. Nice. This article written by Eric Gray for VCritical, © 2009 • VCritical Site Index Read more about ESX, vSphere One comment • Subscribe to RSS • Add to del.icio.us • Follow me on Twitter

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