Planet V12n

A few of the networking requirements for installing a VMware Lab Manager server are: At least one network card A static TCP/IP configuration (no DHCP) Failure to meet the above requirements will result in error message # 5014 during the “Valid NIC Requirement” prerequisite check: Lab Manager…

I had a customer calling me the other day about a weird problem. Some VMs disconnected their NIC after a VMotion. It was not possible to connect the NIC back on a again The customer was in the process of upgrading to vSphere, so used DRS/VMotion to put ESX hosts in maintenance mode, so they could be…

With VMware Distributed power management (DPM) you can save as much as 40% in electricity costs as well as all the other benefits of using virtualization. In vSphere 4 the algorithm of calculation was made more responsible and there was introduced 2 new wake up techniques. Also there is a…

In the first part of this article I discussed the Business Drivers and Operational Benefits, Technology Savings and Operational Improvements of a properly deployed Desktop Virtualization project. Lower Cost of Desktop PC Management Quickly and Easily provision Desktops to Clients Anytime, Anywhere…

My buddy Dudley Smith has done it again.  He’s taken the latest release of my vSphere 4 card and blown it up for printing poster style. Go and grab it here: vSphere4 card – poster size Also, just so you don’t think I’ve been resting on my laurels and letting everyone else do the work,…

What's the definition of cloud computing? I keep asking myself that question and hearing different answers. Despite the frequent use of the term, it still means different things to different people. That was evident at the Cloud Computing Conference & Expo this week in Santa Clara, where I thought I…

The results are in!  I posted the following question on Twitter: VMware Expert? Would you enable HyperThreading or not? 3 Questions, 1 minute Would you? The results were varied and fascinating: 101 people clicked on the link but only 18 people responded.  I guess I need to offer prizes next…

VMware says it won't develop a general-purpose Linux distro, but it may have other tricks – such as a Linux Jeos virtual appliance -- up its sleeve.

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Can I avoid large HA slot sizes due to reservations without resorting to advanced settings? That’s the question I get almost daily. The answer used to be NO. HA uses reservations to calculate the slot size and there’s no way to tell HA to ignore them without using advanced settings pre-vSphere.…

This week I was asked in an email the following question: [By the way I hate Wordpress - even when I put paragraph returns in this post it ****ing well removes them!] Hope you been doing well. I have been busy, busy, busy. Got a question for you. Preparing to start a new vSphere farm and trying…

vSphere 4’s thin provisioning is a pretty cool feature, but it has downsides, too. I was putting together a concise list of pros & cons for a customer, and I thought I’d share (especially given all the thin provisioning talk lately). Please leave me a comment if I’ve missed something. Pros:…

Finextra Inflexible IT systems and bottlenecks in technology development are the two greatest barriers to innovation at European retail banks, according to research from Infosys. Meanwhile, a separate report from the Indian vendor reveals nine out of 10 US banks think IT is vital to innovation.…

Licensing is by far, the most misunderstood, confusing, and sometimes frustrating part of vSphere and vCenter, and generates a ton of calls into support. And we've noticed. Today the Knowledgebase Team released another video KB: Licensing ESX 4.0, ESXi 4.0,...

Occasionally, (more often than I would really like) I get people emailing asking me to help them on specific problems. Unless these are former customers/students I generally hit delete key!!! Sorry, I’m not being unhelpful but I’m not a one-man help desk guys! Then occasionally, when I’m…

This news feed made me chuckle, its on how STEC shares plummeted this week due to EMC cutting back on an intial order with them for Shiny fast expensive SSD that they make for DMX/Vmax.

EMC are very clever in how they market and promote the success of relevant technologies, in fact the top tier…

I want to draw ALL my readers attention to Stu Radridge’s blog and in particular to a particular problem in Windows 2008. Although I hate the phrase this is real heads up… Basically, Stu has discovered that VM created on ESX4 with “Virtual Hardware 7 presents virtual disks as SAN devices –…

I want to take sometime out from book writing, to share my observations about VCE. The book I’m (re)writing is the SRM 1.0 book, it’s been updated to the new version SRM 4.0 which is compatible with vSphere4. So you know this time I’m doing more work to make the book more “storage…

Written by Aaron Silber: This tip has been written by many out there on the big World Wide Web, but figured it was worth repeating, just in case you haven’t seen it. Ever find yourself looking at an Event Log error message hoping that it will...

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In the blog post Inside the OVF Package, we talked about the structure of an OVF package, including the different sections (XML elements). One of the more important sections is the one describing the virtual hardware configuration for a VM. The operating system and applications installed in a…

Siemens IT Solutions and Services has concluded a new partnership agreement with VMware to deliver innovative virtualization solutions to the marketplace. The agreement between Siemens IT Solutions and Services and VMware includes developing new offers and implementing a common marketing and sales…

Project Golden Ratio (inspiration) is a new project - PDF - within the Xen.org community to determine a set of metrics that allow the community to measure and evaluate itself. These set of metrics will allow the community to find areas of strength and weakness in an overall effort to improve…

Syncsort, maker of high-performance data processing, data integration and data protection and recovery software, has announced a new professional services offering for organizations who are planning to deploy server virtualization. Syncsort's MVP (Migration, Verification and Protection) service is…

Server Technology, announces the release of a series of application notes created to help design engineers, application engineers and data center managers power Cisco’s Unified Computing System (UCS). These application notes illustrate how to power and provide redundancy for Cisco UCS 5108 Blade…

  On 11 December 2009 the 5th Dutch VMUG event will be held. It is a technical one day event about virtualization. Last year there were more than 600 visitors.  Here’s a list in my opinion of must see presentations: - Managing VMware vSphere 4 m.b.v. de Virtualization EcoShell by Eric Sloof –…

At times I have a locked down workstation (where installing software is not allowed). And at times, I need to transfer files to a VM which is not available through the network. The solution is to create an ISO and connect it to your VM's CDROM drive.

I guess there are a lot of tools to allow you to…

Expanding Windows 7 virtual hard drive. Quick how-to, real easy to do. You need no tools to achieve this. You just need a copy of VMware Workstation. When you run into a situation that you under-estimated your prevision for your Virtual Machine Disk size. You installed lot’s of software and you…

When I wrote about Net2Display’s 1.0 specification release last week, I reached out to several different industry experts and committee members for opinions to include in the article. One of those folks was Desktone CTO Clint Battersby. In addition to providing comments about Net2Display, he made…

My Spanish friend Jose Maria Gonzalez, (who created the awesome translation of the VI3 reference card), has published a new book. In his own words: VMware ESX and VMware VCP Made Easy, addresses all areas of technology that are important in VMware ESX and the VCP certification. It is a very thorough…

For everyone who is new to VMware Workstation 7 and as a refreshment course for all other VMware workstation users, VMware has released a Free online course you can follow. I must say version 7 of VMware Workstation is a lot faster with starting up and booting virtual machines then version 6.5 was.…

With this blog post title I’m following the footsteps of my virtualization friends Jason Boche and Duncan Epping. I’ve passed the VMware VCDX Design exam yesterday with a score of 362.

I’m not the only one who has passed the exam this week. Congratulations go out to Scott_lowe, FrankDenneman…

I second what Duncan Epping said about Alan Renouf and his vCheck 3 script. In fact, I was in the middle of writing a very similar post when I saw his. I won’t duplicate what Duncan said, but I will say: 1. If you haven’t started using PowerCLI to help manage your infrastructure you might want…

When teaching classes I always show my students how to build up their own vSphere home lab just to run through the labs again or because it’s so cool to do a VMotion at home. One of my students has sent me an email with a link to a really nice device that can save you lots of money on your energy…

http://www.scalemp.com/4-nov-2009-vsmp-foundation-for-cloud Cupertino, Calif. – November 4, 2009 – ScaleMP™, a leading provider of virtualization solutions for high-end computing, today announced an addition to its vSMP Foundation product line, vSMP Foundation for Cloud. The new solution…

http://www.scalemp.com/4-nov-2009-direct-connect-2 Cupertino, Calif. – November 4, 2009 – ScaleMP™, a leading provider of virtualization solutions for high-end computing, today announced an enhancement to its vSMP Foundation for SMP product with the introduction of Direct Connect 2 (DC2)…

Since we get a number of questions on how to use AppSync as well as how it can be utilized, specifically around ThinApp packaged applications such as Office or Adobe CS which are not a single executable like Firefox, Opera, or Adobe Reader, we figured it best to create a video to review how AppSync…

Folks, We had a great time at the Portland VMUG - the people are friendly and the weather was great. Links for folks that are interested in using PowerShell, or Perl to pull performance data. PowerShell, Perl Sample Code Perfomance Sample Code PowerCLI Community: http://vmware.com/go/powercli…

Folks, Thanks for attending yesterdays Coffee Talk Slides Download MP3 Chargeback Recording Download Coffee Talk - vCenter Chargeback API - 2009.11.04 Download Code Samples - vCenter Chargeback APIs - 2009.11.04

Thanks for your blog entries so far on vStorage Thin Provisioning. For those of you yet to post, you have until 11:59 this Friday to get your entry in for this cycle. Below are our entries to date (nice work folks!): 1. Rich Bramley http://vmetc.com/2009/11/03/provision-a-thin-provisioned-standby-…

If you are new to VMware’s products, there’s a good chance that VMware Workstation will be the first product you use of theirs/ours (disclosure: I work for VMware). It was the first product I used before I came to work there. I see today that VMware is offering a free online course to learn the…

Posted 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...

During install vSphere now creates a VMFS partition by default on the local storage on which the service console partitions will be installed. When you want to use this partition to store your VMs on...

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(Please visit the site to view this media) In this week's show: Net2Display released version 1.0 of their protocol specification Gabe made a cool chart Brian is starring in an online Virtual Desktop Challenge game show that you can play and Kaviza provides a demo of their self-reconfiguring…

The Gestalt IT Field Day is shaping up to be quite an event. Next week, on November 12 and 13, industry bloggers and sponsors will gather together for an in-depth, hands-on look at their products. Look for some great information coming out of this event!

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As expected, today VMware, Cisco and EMC announced a special alliance, a coalition as they call it, dubbed Virtual Computing Environment (VCE).

This entity will share investments to sell the components, training and consulting for a number of bundle…

This past Tuesday I took (and passed, thankfully) the VCDX Design Exam. Here is a brief discussion of my testing experience.

This article was originally posted on blog.scottlowe.org. Visit the site for more information on virtualization, servers, storage, and other enterprise technologies.

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Virtu-Al.net Scripts <img>One of the coolest PowerShell scripters in the universe has just released version 14 of his VESI PowerPack. I’m talking about a fellow vExpert Alan Renouf, he created a real cool VESI PowerPack which can be downloaded freely at his website. This PowerPack is able to…

Great tip from Chris Hahn : To disable hot plug on a vSphere VM, add the following line to the VM configuration parameters  : devices.hotplug false Why would you want to do this? With device hotplug enabled, a user that logs into a hardware...

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A while back, we experienced a number of inconvient HA failover false positives where several hundred VMs were powered down even though there was nothing wrong with the hosts. The cause of these incidents were apparently a hick-up in the network lasting more than 15 seconds. To avoid such issues, we…

No, I am not exaggerating. Alan Renouf truly is the uncrowned king of PowerCLI. Although I’ve seen some amazing scripts from other people as well Alan always seems to bring that little extra to make him stand out. No this is not an Alan Renouf appreciation blog article, although he deserves one,…

If you are a user of SAP Community Network, then you might have already seen the new forum about "SAP on VMware" which is live since Oct 21. The forum creates a platform for customers where answers to minor technical questions can be adressed or discussions about best practices, configurations, etc.…

If you just starting with VMware Virtualization and want to learn some new features comming with vSphere 4 just read on. Thin provisioning feature which comes with vSphere 4 is cool enough to talk about . Actually I’m even asking myself how come that I could live without it? Thin provisioning can…

This whitepaper provides the 4 best practices that IT leaders of ROBO organizations need to consider when virtualizing their businesses, providing ROI tips and establishing a roadmap for reducing the Total Cost of Ownership for virtualizing the distributed ROBO environment.

I’ve already mentioned (and posted) about the vSphere Blog Contest current topic of thin provisioning, but I’ve been thinking about another “product” that has always functioned thin provisioned – The VI administrator. That’s right, I’m talking about the guys and gals that manage all…

The GestaltIT Tech Field Day is one week away. This time next week I will be just arriving in the San Francisco Bay Area and getting ready for 2 full days of storage and virtualization product sessions about which I will be reporting here on VM /ETC in the form of tweets and posts. Stephen [...]

F5 Networks today announced a new F5 Management Pack solution for Microsoft System Center Operations Manager that allows joint F5 and Microsoft customers to dynamically manage application delivery in virtual environments. F5 also updated its Application Ready Solution portfolio to support Microsoft…

VMLogix today announced that VMLogix LabManager will support Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization. This combined solution will offer enterprise-class virtual lab automation solution for Linux environments. This new partnership aims to allow customers to consolidate labs leveraging the KVM platform…

ScaleMP, a provider of virtualization solutions for high-end computing, today announced an addition to its vSMP Foundation product line, vSMP Foundation for Cloud. The new solution enables dynamic, on-the-fly aggregation of x86 servers into larger SMP virtual systems. Based on the award-winning…

I’ve created a small video on how to reproduce the hostsfile bug in NetApp System Manager 1.0.1: Video of bug in NetApp System Manager 1.0.1. Posted by Joep Piscaer on Virtual Lifestyle. Add Virtual Lifestyle to your RSS Reader. Follow Joep Piscaer on Twitter. Check out his profile on LinkedIn.

Red Hat yesterday announced the general availability of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers, the newest product set in the Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization portfolio. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers is designed to enable pervasive adoption of virtualization, with a…

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Yesterday, finally, Red Hat announced the availability of its new virtualization offering, which includes a platform based on KVM and an enterprise virtualization manager.

The company already released Enterprise Linux (RHEL) 5.4 in mid September, which features KVM in the same way…

This weeks topic of the VMware Communities Roundtable was the vStorage API. It was most likely one of the most technical roundtables in months. Especially the part about the Virtual Disk Development Kit (aka VDDK) was educational! If you missed the episode you can download it here or subscribe to…

Login to VMware Communities will be unavailable due to scheduled maintenance at the following times:

• Friday, November 6, 2009 from 6:00 PM – 12:00 Midnight PST
• Saturday, November 7, 2009 from 6:00 AM – 8:30 AM PST
• Sunday, November 8, 2009 from 5:00 AM – 9:00 AM PST

During the above times,…

Some IT shops still haven't virtualized, according to a recent survey by Focus. In this article, we explore the most common protests and debunk most of those arguments.

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Desktop virtualization vendors are spinning their wheels trying to get enterprises to adopt the technology, but it turns out, all they really need is a good pandemic. I met with some of VMware Inc.’s desktop virtualization reps yesterday to discuss the next version of VMware View (4.0), which…

Before I start my first post in the VirtualFuture.Info Bloggers-Battle, let me first respond to Matthijs’  first post. And let me remind the readers, this is a Bloggers-Battle. Matthijs and I are trying to convince each other and the readers that one product is a better choice than another, just…

One of the enhancements or features in VMware's latest release, vSphere, is the option to create virtual machines with thin provisioned disks. I found the skinny on Thin Provisioning with vSphere on the VMware Blog by Michael Adams. vStorage Thin Provisioning optimizes storage costs through the…

This week's VMTN podcast was Title: #69 - The Virtualization Journey with Vittorio Viarengo was a discussion about the steps for driving a successful virtualization adaption.  You can also download the podcast on iTunes. For years now I have had a tag line that I use. It's my motto, if ...…

I was combing through the VMTN community forums and came across a couple of posts on the best way to extend or expand a vmdk file.  This topic seems to come up on a regular basis, so I thought it might be a good idea to put together a blog ...<img>

I was recently asked what I thought was the best way to organize things in vCenter?  I personally have used several different methods to organize things in different ways. I started to wonder how other admins were organizing their own environments and if there was any common methods of madness ...…

I was reading some blogs and come across this notable piece of information posted by Tom Howarth over at the PlanetVM and since I just passed the VCP4 exam thought this would be worth mentioning again.  The original post can be found here. Upgrade to VCP4! VMware is allowing participating…

Let me paint a picture for you on something that I have seen pop up more than once.  You send a request to the SAN team to get some storage added to your virtual infrastructure.  The SAN team replies back that your LUNS are ready and available. You rescan your ...<img>

Every once in a while something goes wrong in my lab and I get to spend some quality time working out what happened and how to fix it.  Well after doing updates the other night I did encounter an error that I had not seen before and wanted to share.  ...<img>

If you are involved in virtualization at all then you know that VMworld is coming up August 31 - September 3 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco. There is a change in the format this year that is well worth mentioning.  VMware is having Technology Exchange Developer Day on ...<img>

It seems the big news for the day is the Announcement of the VCE Coalition.  Seems I have been reading blog posts about this all morning with the last post being Scott Lowe's thoughts on the subject. I have been hearing that this has been in the works for a ...<img>

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 ...…

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press_kits/2009/thrive09/InfrastructureSolutions.pdf PALO ALTO, Calif., Nov. 4, 2009 – HP today announced an extension of its BladeSystem Solution Builder program to enable additional independent software vendors (ISVs) to build solutions that customers can…

http://www.hp.com/hpinfo/newsroom/press/2009/091104xa.html HP today announced new products, solutions and services that help organizations drive innovation and rapidly scale up and down to meet changing business needs. New research conducted on behalf of HP shows that more than 90 percent of senior…

The new Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization for Servers platform made its debut yesterday, with Red Hat touting it as a “standalone, lightweight, high-performance hypervisor” that “provides a solid virtualization foundation for cloud deployments” and comes with software “for configuring,…

Cityspur.com “Green computing” isn’t just about saving the world for the next generation. The primary focus is cutting costs, improving efficiency, and getting near-term, measurable results. The following questions and answers address the business benefits of eco-friendly computing and show…

NY times blog The era of such a deeply philosophical data center question is upon us. A pair of stealthy start-ups have placed smartphone chips at the center of their plans to create a new breed of low-power servers. They’re hoping that this radical take on data center hardware will attract the…

HP HP have released this report illustrating what challenges business leaders feel they face and how their IT might aid them in these challenges, an interesting read, do download it and check it out. Related posts:IBM releases it’s Corporate Responsibility Report PR Newswire ARMONK, N.Y., July 6…

PRWEB Renton, WA (Vocus/PRWEB ) October 7, 2009 — Cloud enablement leader, Parallels, today announced enhancements to its server virtualization product portfolio to enable its network of cloud services partners to compliment their virtualized services with new offerings based on their just-…

Something that I noticed over the last months while doing design reviews is that hardly anyone documents decisions in a design. Most designs I review are physical designs, which is understandable as most IT people are technical people who could not care less about logical designs. I am perfectly…

“If TV were as complicated as remoting protocols, we would all read a lot more books.” This was Desktone CTO Clint Battersby’s first words when I asked for his thoughts on last Friday’s Version 1.0 release of the Net2Display protocol specification by VESA . As longtime readers of…

While tinkering around with the new NetApp System Manager 1.0.1, I found something that could be considered a bug. I’m connecting the manager to a FAS2020 with the most recent ONTAP version (7.3.2), and needed to set up some (temporary) virtual IP’s and DNS-names. For this last item, I edited…

Initially when I started this script I wanted people to be clear that this was a report that was going to give you a daily summary of any issues which may exist in your Virtual Infrastructure, from the beta testing I did to a select few it was clear that they were expecting this to [...]

Unless you have been hiding under a rock you will have noticed some big announcements come out from Cisco, EMC and VMware around their new alliance, the Virtual Computing Environment Coalition.

As I have mentioned numerous times I am a big fan of The VESI and Alan Renouf’s powershell blog, well now Alan has released his powerpack for The VESI which means every VMware admin can have the power of Alan Renouf in their toolkit. Alan has taken his scripts and incorporated them in the VESI…

Wow quite a surprise I have been shortlisted for the Computerweekly.com IT Blog Awards 2009: Individual IT Professional Male. Head on over to http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2009/09/20/237824/it-blog-awards-2009-individual-it-professional-male.htm to cast your votes!

Parallels today announced the availability of Parallels Desktop 5 for Mac. This is the latest version of the number 1 Mac system utility, currently enabling more than 2 million users to run Windows, Linux and other operating systems side-by-side with Mac OS X. According to performance research…

I lost a good friend Sunday. Vinay Venkatesh, also known as djgraphite, was a friend and co-worker at VMware. We had known each other for many years, since before he joined VMware, from the #adium and #growl channels on irc.freenode.net back when I worked on libgaim and he worked on Growl. Vinay was…

When conducting a vSphere upgrade using either the Host Update utility or Update Manager you get the following error appear on the host console.  It is first worth checking that you do have enough free space using the vdf –h command and this error message does not appear on update manager or…

… Most customers can’t afford that status quo, where the majority of their expenditures go into keeping the lights on versus innovation.  It really comes down to the CIO’s desire to enable their business strategy rather than a cost center. … This is how Cisco’s John Chambers portrayed…

This document is a beginner’s guide to configuring and using PowerShell to perform administration tasks within a VMware Infrastructure. This assumes little or no experience with PowerShell and will go through the steps of downloading, configuring and using it to perform simple tasks.

Lately I keep receiving questions from colleagues regarding virtual infrastructure design using VMware products. So I decided to sum up the best practices I use when designing a new virtual infrastructure. Some of the best practices are based on numbers and calculations but others are pretty…

Cisco Systems, EMC, and VMware today announced a joint venture to sell a new integrated data center product, dubbed vBlock. Think of vBlock as the plug and play data-center solution, it will consist of Cisco UCS/Nexus/MDS, EMC Storage and VMware Virtualization all within a pre-designed and built…

HP is announcing it’s own Converged Infrastructure Architecture with associated services and partner offerings later today which will “integrate existing silos of compute, storage, network, and facility resources with unified management to deliver a virtualized, highly automated technology…

So, we should all know what VCE stands for by now, right? Let’s say it together: “VMware, Cisco, EMC.” Using a bad analogy of Adam Lambert, a contestant on American Idol last season, the three companies “came out of the data center” today and publicly announced what we already knew;…

With the recent release of the new version of VMware Workstation 7, there is a new offer for a free online multimedia training on VMware’s Website. You can watch free videos on you own pace. There are 3 modules you can follow. Module 1: VMware Workstation Overview Module 2: Getting Started with…

With the tremendous number of new Workstation 7 customers, I am very excited to announce the availability of a free introductory, self-paced online course. The course is designed for people who are new VMware Workstation and it will quickly walk...

Well – it’s a big day today :-) For context – here’s the announcement, and I will also link to the recording of the 3 CEOs discussing what it is, what it isn’t, and what it means. Here’s also a...

This is one of a 5 post series on the VCE coalition announcement, what’s in it, and what it means. You can see all the posts together here. Ok – as we sat on telepresence after telepresence, and f2f meeting...

Todays announcement from EMC, Cisco and VMware (ECV) amounted to a declaration of war on the datacenter players in the industry as we know it. But it wasn’t the only thing that it amounted to – I see it as the first true sign of utility computing, and if the rest of the industry just [...]

The Virtual Computing Environment backed by Cisco, VMware and EMC promises easier virtualization and private clouds, but IT pros aren't sold.

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Cisco Systems, EMC, and VMware today announced a joint venture to sell a new integrated data center product, dubbed vBlock. The venture will sell and provide maintenance and service support for the product, and combine EMC's storage equipment, Cisco's virtualized servers and networking equipment as…

Wyse today announced an alliance with NetSupport for its NetSupport School software, the class leading software solution that provides teachers with the ability to instruct, monitor and interact with their students. By integrating NetSupport School, Wyse’s desktop provisioning software and energy…

3Leaf Systems today marked a significant milestone as it announced a disruptive set of technologies that enable the "Dynamic Data Center". The company launched the x86-based Dynamic Data Center - Server for the AMD Opteron family of processors and outlined plans for supporting the Intel QPI 1.1…

Parallels today announced the availability of Parallels Small Business Panel 10, which allows cloud services providers to offer IT-in-a-box solutions to small businesses, increasing revenue through business applications sales, and helping their small business customers transition to the cloud.…

I went to a customer today to configure a NetApp FAS2020 for SnapMirror replication. For sake of argument, let’s call this filer FLR2. After hooking up the fibre channel interconnect to a second diskshelf (containing SATA-disks), I noticed that all disks from the onboard shelf were missing. They…

StarWind Software, a provider of storage virtualization and a pioneer in iSCSI storage, today announced a release of the fifth-generation of its flagship product StarWind 5.0, an iSCSI SAN software platform which turns any industry-standard x86 or x64 Windows server into a fail-safe, fault-tolerant…

Bridgescale Partners, a California-based investment firm, has led a U.S. $11 million minority investment in Toronto-based BlueCat Networks, a provider of enterprise-class IP Address Management (IPAM) platforms. Having just completed a record sales quarter, BlueCat Networks will use its first…

Okay Sven, the game is on! This is my first post in the VirtualFuture.Info VDI Blog Battle, to convince Sven, and all you out there, why Citrix XenDesktop 4 would be the right solution for future desktops. I’ll be talking about Citrix XenDesktop 4 this month and try to point out to you some of…

VMware, EMC, Cisco, VCE, Intel, Acadia….whew! what does it all mean?!  VMware, Cisco and EMC created a new marketing ploy called VCE (Virtual Compute Environment), this will provide technical innovations as well as integrated pre-sales services and support. What is the product? vBlock.  Think…

The purpose of the Net2Display™ Remoting standard is to provide efficient remoting of computer display and I/O capabilities across local and wide area computer networks. Supported I/O capabilities include keyboards, pointers, audio and USB attached peripheral devices. Net2Display Remoting is…

All VMware Fusion users take note, two new KB articles we just posted today deal with two common problem customers are currently experiencing with upgrades from Windows XP to Windows 7, as well as the creation of new VMs using...

I had an interesting issue today with enabling AD authentication on a ESX4 host. On ESX3.5, when you run : esxcfg-auth –enablad, it will open all the needed ports on the ESX console. In ESX4 it opens port 88 UDP, but this did not work. As soon as we openend 88 TCP we could use our [...]

The Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition was announced this morning. This is a coalition between Cisco and EMC, together with VMware to accelerate customers’ ability to increase business agility. Apart from bringing a single point of contact for design, service,...

I got my results from the Enterprise Exam I wrote 2 weeks ago….and I passed !! So the next step to VCDX is to pass my Design Exam. Also note for those in South Africa you can write the Exams now in South Africa…so good luck !

Here’s another new book just out about VMware VMware ESX and ESXi. According to Amazon.com, you’ll not only learn the basics — how to pool resources from hardware servers, computer clusters, networks, and storage, and then distribute them among virtual machines — but also the stumbling…

Network Asia.net As virtualization stretches deeper into the enterprise to include mission-critical and resource-intensive applications, IT executives are learning that double-digit physical-to-virtual server ratios are things of the past. Virtualization vendors may still be touting the potential of…

http://newsroom.cisco.com/dlls/2009/corp_110309.html SAN JOSE, California – November 3, 2009 – Cisco and EMC, together with VMware, today introduced the Virtual Computing Environment coalition, an unprecedented collaboration of three information technology (IT) industry leaders. The coalition…

This is one of a 5 post series on the VCE coalition announcement, what’s in it, and what it means. You can see all the posts together here. Our partner ecosystem is very, very, VERY important to Cisco, EMC and...

This is one of a 5 post series on the VCE coalition announcement, what’s in it, and what it means. You can see all the posts together here. We know that the alternative exists from companies (and respected competitiors) like...

This is one of a 5 post series on the VCE coalition announcement, what’s in it, and what it means. You can see all the posts together here. The ultimate expression that a customer agrees with the philosophy of Infrastructure...

This is one of a 5 post series on the VCE coalition announcement, what’s in it, and what it means. You can see all the posts together here. Ok, knowing my beloved and technophile readership, you will tend to have...

Well, www.vWorkspace.com is down at the time of this writing.  So I’m scouring the intertubes for some quick guidance.  Here’s what I’m finding. Guidance from Citrix.  Yes, it’s not vWorkspace, but the fundamentals should be similar:  http://support.citrix.com/article/CTX114522 – The…

The VCE announcement is cool, but what does it really mean? It's a bit early to tell yet, but here are some quick thoughts.

This article was originally posted on blog.scottlowe.org. Visit the site for more information on virtualization, servers, storage, and other enterprise technologies.

A Few Quick…

We all know that the future version of vSphere will probably only be the ESXi version. At least, this is what VMware’s aim is for ESX5. Because it is wise to already get used to ESXi now to get...

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VMware has been running a blogging contest in order to promote the new vSphere Blog. The current contest topic is vSphere Thin Provisioning. A lot has been written on this topic already, but I thought I would point out a storage design conclusion I’ve come up with based mostly from the…

Chris Hahn made some interesting networking observations recently at a client :  I was testing provisioned XP desktops at [CENSORED] today, and I noticed that the provisioned XP VM performance seemed very slow, though no timeouts were showing...

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Unbelievable.  That old tale about VMware adding an extra layer is still being told in the Microsoft Virtualization Comparison Brochure.  Pretty surprising, and not at all honest — using the term layer implies a particular order or hierarchy, not merely quantity.  And what on earth is the…

16th November will be a very funny day! Two Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) solutions from two big players around the VDI world release a new version of it’s VDI product with the same version number, isn’t that great? VMware View 4 will bring us PCoIP while Citrix XenDesktop 4 focus is on…

I see many organizations going through the desktop virtualization process without being able to answer simple questions like – What are your primary drivers for desktop virtualization? or – How will your organization benefit from desktop virtualization? or even – What is the estimate cost and…

This whitepaper provides key information about how VDI can save you time and money throughout your organisation.

With the launch of VMware View 4 with PCoIP on the horizon Scott Murnan, European Director of Teradici, was in the Netherlands at the end of October and Ann Jan had the pleasure to do an interview with him. Together they shed some light on Teradici, the new PCoIP protocol, the differences with RCP…

I’m getting an “error message: 28038″ just before the VMware VCenter Server installation end as screen shot below: Workaround: It’s pretty simple but it took me few hours(damn!). Please make sure your VCenter server have minimum one network cable connect to switches. Related…

As we reach the end of 2009, I wanted to take a look at the Citrix product landscape as it sits today.  We receive many requests to outline what Citrix is up to, as well as for some sort of correlation between the current product names and their historical names.  In June of 2007, we published our…

Power Pack for PowerGUI and VESI from Virtu-Al Aren’t your little bit afraid when it comes to using scripting for your Virtual Infrasctructure? You think that scripts its not for you? You think that you must be a programmer or so? Not any more. With Alain Renouf’s PowerPack for VESI and PowerGUI…

Today marks yet another great milestone for OpenSolaris and OpenStorage. SUN has as promised, delivered a much anticipated de-duplication feature for us to explore and use.  I must say that I am very excited about it and with no doubt this is a very cool feature indeed The ideas for how to use it…

Using hosted VDI for a few days, plenty of comments.

Hosted VDI isn't exactly new, but made easy with current technologies.

Today, VMware announced in a press release that SAP Managed Services, SAP AG's internal IT infrastructure provider, has deployed the VMware platform pervasively across its IT environment as the main virtualization platform for agile and adaptable implementations of SAP solutions.

This announcement…

Well, I don’t really go in for this stuff normally. You know when friends FWD some really hysterical joke to everyone in their address book. You know, that kind of thing. But this one did make me laugh or was that snort with recognition. A man in a hot air balloon realised he was lost. He [...]

Back by popular demand is my step-sons “iPage” cartoons which occasionally touch on IT related topics. Nathan recently graduated from Oxford Brookes University with a degree in IT and some other stuff. He’s currently temping and working in a call-centre. Life really chokes in the job market…

Just like Jason Boche I thought it was time to renew my Blog theme. I had the old one for over 8 months already and it was time to renew it. I tried to keep it simple again and actually downsized the banners. Also removed some of the Google Adsense blocks as it was too [...]

I got an email from Anne, who’s got her first HP server: “The ILO keeps reporting that it has failed, but we haven’t plugged it in, can I stop it from doing this? I Didn’t want to read a long manual for this and hoped you might know. Hope you can let me know Anne ” My response: “Great…

VMware is organizing an online virtualization event on November 10th and 11th: VMware virtual events are highly interactive events conducted online using only a web browser. They include all of the areas that you may find at a physical event, including an exhibit hall, auditorium, resource center…

I participate in Techtarget’s Server Virtualization Advisory Board. Here is a link to this months topic: Related Posts: XenEnterprise Wins SearchEnterpriseLinux's Virtualization Product of the Year VDI Can Alleviate Commuting Costs Desktop Hypervisor Article on Techtarget Citrix Partners React…

Today I received an invitation for a ‘What’s new in VMware View 4′ training. According to this invitation the release of VMware’s new version of View including the long awaited PCoIP will be release November 16th. That is a week later then the date mentioned in earlier VMware View release…

I have been teasing people on twitter for a week or so now and have just uploaded my PowerPack to the PowerGUI site, you can download it here As you can see from the screen shot on the left, this is a first attempt at providing most of my scripts in one PowerPack and adding to [...]

So after my last post, VMware did some digging and the real reason for the initially odd behaviour was exposed – it’s a combination of the way Virtual Hardware 7 presents virtual disks to Guests, and the difference in default policy settings of Windows Server 2008 Standard Edition and Windows…

Part 3 of my backup products review has been released at SearchVMware.com. Follow the link below to see my review on “Vizioncore vRanger Pro 4.0″ Backup and replication product review...

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Note: This is a brief story where I was forced to sit back and reflect on just how cool this Virtualization stuff really is. Please feel free to disregard however. Normally I don’t write about the VMware Workstation or hosted products. It just doesn’t happen to be where I spend most of my day.…

Let's start week 2 of Thin Provisioning off with a bang! Did you know the new Thin Provisioning feature is available with all vSphere 4.0 editions (standard, advanced, enterprise, and enterprise plus)? See what our engineers have to say about Thin Provisioning.

Computerworld Computerworld – Jeff Allison’s company is considering desktop virtualization, and that task will most likely fall on his shoulders. In Allison’s perfect world, however, he’d leave that to the desktop experts. But virtualization has never been a perfect world, and it’s even…

Starwindsoftware just released a version 5.0 of iSCSI SAN software for Windows. The new version of Starwind iSCSI SAN was just released by Starwindsoftware. With easier setup (no need to install startport driver anymore) and feature like High availability. The HA feature provides automatic failover…

In the last week these items are added or edited in VMware’s Knowledgebase at http://kb.vmware.com VMware ESXIn certain configurations, Storage VMotion fails and the virtual disk or RDM is destroyed (1015183)Date Published: 10/27/2009 VMware FusionUnderstanding Unity and the Windows System Tray…

The trash talk in the Microsoft vs. VMware feud once reached Reggie Miller vs. Spike Lee heights. The two companies rarely passed up the opportunity to disparage, make fun of or even spread lies about each other. But things had quieted down lately, and a lot of the more recent trash talk just…

My blogging activities were very low last month (close to none actually) and I apologize for that. It must have been because I spend most of the time crying because my co-blogger Matthijs left the company I work for and he decided to work for the competition. Being competitors at the moment, I…

Here is our monthly update of the Top 20 KB articles for the month of October, based on use by customers. Upgrading to ESX 4.0 and vCenter 4.0 best practices (1009039) Restarting the Management agents on an ESX or ESXi...

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At the end of the last week Reuters broke the news about an upcoming joint venture between EMC, its subsidiary VMware and Cisco.

The three should announce a new product portfolio this week, called vBlock, probably gluing together Cisco Unified Computing…

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Just last week virtualization.info questioned the Microsoft effort on desktop virtualization (including application virtualization and the so called enterprise desktop virtualization, what we call here platform wrappers).
Our article mentioned the MED-V lethargic development…

Here is a nice write-up from Jacques Bensimon with a follow-up by Aaron Silber on creating a new Citrix console MMC. On the subject of unwanted event log entries, another one (from Citrix this time) is a DCOM event 10016 that shows up on all...

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VMware Workstation 7.0 VMware Workstation 7.0 offers vSphere 4.0 and ESX Support — Install and run ESX 4.0 as a guest operating system. VMware Certified Professionals (VCPs) and technical professionals can install the latest server virtualization software and experiment with server setup, conduct…

RT @heathseals: i feel like i've wasted a large portion of my life waiting for .NET to install and or update. sigh. # RT @samj: RT @glynmoody: All Your Docs Belong to You: Google Docs Now Exportable – http://bit.ly/3RJQUV as ODF files, too: cool # odf # google # RT @ericbh: RT @LiquidwareLabs:…

VMware ESX In certain configurations, Storage VMotion fails and the virtual disk or RDM is destroyed (1015183) Date Published: 10/27/2009 VMware Fusion Understanding Unity and the Windows System Tray in Fusion 3 (1015326) Date Published: 10/29/2009 Importing a Boot Camp...

The VMware Virtualization Forum event is a free, interactive full day event where you will learn about virtual infrastructure from experts, industry analysts and companies like yours. No matter what your company size, there's a virtualization solution for you—from the desktop to the datacenter.

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How many of your HP Proliant servers do you re-commission as virtualization hosts or have running that have outdated firmware?  With the wide-spread adoption of virtualization there is more reason than ever to keep your server’s firmware updated to ensure that the hardware has updates that could…

Last week I had to install a vCenter 4.0 server with a database on a SQL 2008 x64 server. Before you can connect to the SQL 2008 x64 you have to install the new SQL server 2008 Native client. You can find it here: X86 Package X64 Package Download and install the package: In my earlier post [...]

  Maybe you’ve dug out that old server that you’ve had lying around for a while now and want to install VMware ESX or ESXi 4.0 on to it but upon doing so you get the following error message and things come to a grinding halt when going to start the installation process: “Booting:…

There will be the vForum which organize by VMware in Malaysia at 17 th November 2009. The session will started from  8 :00 am to 5:30 pm. You can view more information from the official site. You can also register yourself from here. See you there. Related posts:1st Meet Up for Malaysia VMware…

This was probably one of the toughest Top-5's to write as I had the week off this week. I basically had to catch-up with a whole week of Planet V12n. One of the most annoying things about it is that...

Freware from Xtravirt to manage ESX Server Logs. vLogView is a Windows® based application which manages VMware® ESX Server log files. The product should installed on an administrators PC, and provides the ability to store, view and search ESX Server log files from multiple ESX Servers, without…

One of the fun things about running stuff at home, once you have something working remotely well you sure don’t want to change it.   As such I have setup Bind 9 with DHCP and it works pretty good with a bunch of scripts I have to handle various dynamic adding and removing from my running [...]

Ok, backups, the bain of my life, I remember in a previous role we had to split this job, each of us doing a one week rota on backups as they should be the kind of thing that you run and everything is fine, but did they ever work ? No. Anyway enough about my hate [...]

On 27th and 28th of October 2009 VMware held its user conference vForum in Sydney Australia. With over 2100 attendees combined with 40 partners and vendors who were exhibiting it was one of the biggest IT events in Australia for the year.