Planet V12n

VMware had officially released the vSphere 4 update 1 yesterday. There are many new support features and also bug fixes. Is time to take a look for a major upgrade this month to overcome some challenges we faced with the previous version. Please view more information from the release note. Beside…

If you had previously deployed FCoE and 10 Gbps Ethernet with Qlogic CNA adapter, you may now able to see them are part of the HCL list been certified by VMWare officially. This had clear up a lot of curious question we had asked around for the pass 2 quarters why Qlogic had not been [...]

Happy thanksgiving to my American colleagues! after a bunch of “high level” of posts, glad to do a technical one again :-) Glad to see vSphere 4 udpate 1 hit today – you can get more here. A couple important...

Part Duex. VMware Security Advisory Advisory ID: VMSA-2009-0014.1 Synopsis: VMware ESX patches for DHCP, Service Console kernel, and JRE resolve multiple security issues Issue date: 2009-10-16 Updated on: 2009-11-19 CVE numbers: [...]

Finally its here, View4 is now available for download: https://www.vmware.com/tryvmware/p/download.php?p=view4&lp=1 Release notes are here: https://www.vmware.com/support/view40/doc/releasenotes_viewmanager40.html

Forget the actual product, this is what I’ve been waiting for VMware View 4 documentation is now available for download: http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/view_pubs.html ===== New View 4 documentation now available originally posted by Forbes Guthrie on vReference. Subscribe to my RSS feed…

today I have received three yes three advisories from VMware as usual I will print them in full.  now only one of these is a completely now one, the later two are Updates VMware Security Advisory Advisory ID:       VMSA-2009-0016 Synopsis:          VMware vCenter and ESX update…

My cohort Gene Kim and I were in San Francisco meeting with a number of journalists yesterday.  We were discussing trends, virtualization, IT risks, and things of that sort and everyone wanted to know about what new risks, threats, etc. were going to be a problem in the next year. Everyone wanted…

Today’s the last day before a week long vacation over Thanksgiving and it’s been a continual mad dash for the finish line.  The rain is falling, the wind is howling, and I’m not looking forward to a vacation painting project…what better time than to catch up on a few key virtualization…

The Google Chrome OS source was released by Google yesterday and the rockstars at gdgt.com have compiled it and released a VMware virtual machine to make it easy for VMware Workstation and VMware Player users to give it a try....

Working with VMware VMsafe application programming interfaces, IBM announced Virtual Server Security for vSphere, and other virtualization product news.

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Vmware released VMware vSphere (ESX) 4 Update 1 New in this release (from the release notes): VMware View 4.0 support – This release adds support for VMware View 4.0, a solution built specifically for delivering desktops as a managed service from the protocol to the platform. Windows 7 and Windows…

So a while back I made a post about some new best practices for vSphere based on some new features that were available. One of the ugly points at the time was that while the new PVSCSI controller was awesome, you could only use it for additional disks. Well I’m thankful to report that as of [...]

Looks like VMware is already preparing for the launch of Intel’s newest chip. I noticed the following in vCenter 4 Update 1’s EVC Cluster options: Good to note this means that there is sufficient changes ahead to require a different EVC mode. That means for those of you installing Nehalem-based…

Looking at the VMware vCenter 4.0 Update 1 Release Notes, it appears we may be looking at 64-bit only versions of vCenter Server in the future: “Future releases of VMware vCenter Server might not support installation on 32-bit Windows operating systems. VMware recommends installing vCenter Server…

VMware has finally released the first update to vSphere almost 6 months after the initial release of vSphere in May 2009. Version 4.0 Update 1 delivers many fixes to bugs and issues as well as support for new features, products and operating systems. Perhaps the biggest updates in this release are…

I’ve just begun to pull together some interesting data on a series of Linux VM crashes I’ve seen. I don’t have a resolution yet, but some interesting patterns have emerged. Crash Symptoms A CentOS 4.x or 5.x guest will crash with a message similar to the following on its console: CentOS 4.x:…

<img>After Google announced the availability of the Chrome OS / Chromium OS source code, one of GDGT's engineers (Jon Ursenbach), immediately got to work on compiling the code, trying to see if he could get an instance of Chromium OS running in a virtual machine.

He was finally able to do it!…

  VMware just released vSphere 4 update 1. With this update the vSphere client now supports Windows 7 as an OS! Technorati Tags: Windows 7,vSphere Client,VMware addthis_url = 'http%3A%2F%2Fblog.virtualarchitect.nl%2F2009%2F11%2Fvsphere-client-on-windows-7%2F'; addthis_title =…

  Today when i woke up there where a lot of VMware updates available (to much to handle for one day ).  I did an upgrade of my lab environment, it went smooth with any issues. VMware did a great job with the new improvements! Here’s a list of improvements with some screenshots: VMware [...]

Today we released an updated version of VMware Data Recovery (VDR) – we have been working hard on this release for the past few months and we think it moves the needle significantly forward. Get more information about the updated VDR release here. So, what are the highlights of this updated…

Jon Hall from the Certification team at VMware has confirmed today that holders of the VCP4 certification will get a new license for VMware Workstation 7. There is a process that has to be finished internally within VMware, then the licenses will be released. VCP3 holders will still receive a…

My colleague Lee Dilworth just emailed me the following. Those who are running vSphere ESX(i) and have the Cisco Nexus1000v installed might want to read this: If your customers are on ESXi/ESX 4.0 and want to update to U1 using the vihostupdate then first they need to read this new KB:…

The first major update to vSphere 4 delivers highly coveted support for Windows 7 as a host and as guest operating system.

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Yesterday was a busy day for releases at VMware: vSphere 4.0 Update 1 Released Key enhancements: VMware View 4.0 support (hint, hint…) Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 support Enhanced Clustering Support for Microsoft Windows Enhanced VMware Paravirtualized SCSI Support Improved vNetwork Distributed…

The maximum uptime solution for vCenter has been upgraded to 5.5 Update 2 and can be downloaded here.  Here’s the what’s new section from the release notes: Support for Windows Server 2008 SP1 and SP2 (x86/x64) — VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat now supports running on Windows Server 2008 SP1…

Oracle have recently added a Oracle VM Template for PeopleSoft which delivers a “quick start” of PeopleSoft HCM with Oracle Database on Oracle Enterprise Linux to the Oracle VM Template library.

VMware DataRecovery version 1.1 have been released today. You can find the release notes here. One of the new features is the file level restore that is now fully supported. Reading the manual it looks like you can do the file level restore from within the VM. But hey…I mut still go and test it…

ENISA (the European Network and Information Security Agency) today launched their 124 page report on Cloud Computing Security Risk Assessment. At first glance it’s an excellent read and will be a fantastic accompaniment to the the CSA’s guidance.  I plan to dig into it more over the weekend. …

Recently I had the opportunity to review StorMagic’s SvSAN software. Their current release available from their website is only compatible with VMware ESX 3.5, since my home lab is already running...

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While I generally don’t like doing a “Me Too” sort of post, I think the U1 release of vSphere is important enough to recap what some of the other blogs are saying on this. Rather than ramble off what has changed, and what is improved, etc. I will instead point you to some blogs who [...]

Taipei, Taiwan, Nov 20, 2009 – Leadtek Research Inc., known globally for extreme visual graphics technology development, is pleased to announce its newest virtual desktop certifications and solutions, strengthening its strategic partnership with VMware®. Source:…

vSphere 4 update 1 released. Just saw the news on Jason’s site. It’s the long time awaited vSphere 4 update 1 which has been released last night. But not only. Together with ESX 4, ESXi 4 and vCenter Server there are updates available for other products, to insure the compatibility and…

Contributed article by Ido Sarig, chief evangelist and CMO for BDNA 2010 Trends: Virtual Sprawl Unchecked Leads to Software License Compliance... Read more at VMblog.com.<img>

I guess all of us are confused at this point whether it’s “vMotion” or “VMotion”! Every now and then, we would see a slide/wp/document/blog-post/presentation mentioning the term in a deferent way. I showed on twitter lately one of these slides which was taken from an official VMware…

Update 1 for ESX4 has been released:

- VMware View 4.0 support
- Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 support – This release adds support for 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 7 as well as 64-bit Windows 2008 R2 as guest OS platforms.
vSphere Client is now supported and can be installed on a Windows 7…

When you start the autorun of vSphere vCenter 4.0 update, you will notice a new button called Agent Pre-upgrade Check. In this post you, I will show you the wizard. Choose the right credentials to connect the vCenter database: Choose your scan type: And wait. My hosts are ready to upgrade:…

VMware just released two new editions of vSphere which are specifically targeted at retail store / branch office environments. A PDF describing these package can be found here and the solution page on VMware.com can be found here. VMware vSphere Essentials for Retail and Branch Offices offers a…

It’s here!  The much anticipated first major update (U1) to VMware ESX 4.0 and vCenter 4.0 has been released and is now available to download from VMware.  The sections below provide a summary of what is new and/or enhanced in this update 1 release for both ESX 4.0 and vCenter 4.0 though, as…

On November 20, 2008, Gabe and I wrote that The Brian Madden Company had been acquired by TechTarget . It's hard to believe it's been a year already, although it's cool that I finally know most of my coworkers' names. In the past year...(read more)<img><img>

After many rumours that update 1 for vSphere would be released on the 19th of November we were all sorely disappointed, with new rumours it would be Monday 23rd. Much to my surprise this morning it has been released. The biggest new features are View 4 support, Windows 7 vSphere client support…

In the previous version of PowerCLI we had 165 great cmdlets to play with and didn’t we have fun, now in the new version (Download Here) we have a whopping….. That’s right, an extra 68 cmdlets (4 of the old cmdlets were renamed from the previous version), bring on the fun ! So as well as the…

VMware just released ESX 4.0 Update 1 and vCenter 4.0 Update 1. Most people have already reported on this by now. Two things that stood out for me personally is the following: HA Cluster Configuration Maximum — HA clusters can now support 160 virtual machines per host in HA Cluster of 8 hosts or…

Finally the vSphere Client is supported on Windows 7 & Windows Server 2008 R2: Windows 7 and Windows 2008 R2 support — This release adds support for 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Windows 7 as well as 64-bit Windows 2008 R2 as guest operating system platforms. In addition, the vSphere Client is now…

With a recent release of VMware SRM 4, there has been also a new feature introduced. VMware SRM was released few weeks back. SRM 4.0 is fully compatible with VMware vSphere 4. VMWare Site Recovery helps you create and successfully test recovery plans for your datacenter. VMware SRM is used to…

Tonight we released PowerCLI 4.0 U1. This release contains more than 60 new cmdlets as well as greatly improved performance, a new feature to make it easy to manage multiple ESX or vCenter servers from a single window and much,...

Last night VMware has released Update 1 for ESXi 4, ESX 4, and vCenter server 4. According to the release notes Update 1 includes the following improvements: Support for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2; Support for View 4; Support for 160 VMs per host in a HA cluster with 8 hosts or less;…

VMware vSphere PowerCLI 4.0 Update 1 has been tested against the beta release of vSphere 4.1. To find the related issues, see Known Issues, Compatibility with VMware vSphere 4.1 Beta.

What's New in This Release?
This release of vSphere PowerCLI 4.0 Update 1 introduces the following new capabilities:

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The following information provides highlights of some of the enhancements available in this release of VMware ESX:

VMware View 4.0 support – This release adds support for VMware View 4.0, a solution built specifically for delivering desktops as a managed service from the protocol to the platform.

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While the Dutch and UK bloggers sleep, VMware has released Update 1 for ESXi 4, ESX 4, and vCenter 4. Notable improvements include: View 4 support Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2 support (Support for Windows 7 was timed nicely for View 4) DB2 database back end support (Who requested this?…

The VMGuy has the scoop on all the VMware releases tonight! VMware has also made available an updated version of the GUI based virtual machine (VM) backup and restore plugin for vCenter 4, VMware Data Recovery 1.1 (VDR). Download it here and check the check the Release Notes here. VMware is saying…

It was speculated that it might not happen until next week (Monday 11/23), but VMware engineer Dave Lawrence’s post Release: ESX 4.0 Update 1 on his VMGuy Blog confirms that ESX 4.0 U1 is now available for download. The most notable changes in this update include full support for VMware View 4…

The little backup application that could just got better and upgraded to v1.1 and can be downloaded here.  Here’s the Enhancements section from the release notes: File Level Restore Functionality is Officially Supported File Level Restore (FLR) provides a way to access individual files within…

vCenter was also updated tonight with update 1 and can be downloaded here.  Here’s the What’s new section from the release notes: IBM DB2 Database Support for vCenter Server — This release adds support for IBM DB2 9.5 as the backend database platform for VMware vCenter Server 4.0. The…

The first update of ESX 4.0 has been released and can be downloaded here.  Here’s the What’s new section from the release notes: VMware View 4.0 support – This release adds support for VMware View 4.0, a solution built specifically for delivering desktops as a managed service from the…

A little over a month ago I was interviewed by Processor.com on finding the right server for your data center or project. It is a good guide for anyone in the position of choosing servers in today's infrastructure. What I tried to convey is to choose more dynamic servers, look beyond the "speeds and…

Everybody does it, but how unsupported is it?

Burton Group I would like to welcome the Burton Group to our blog (bladewatch.com), it is great that they have decided to support us in delivering our content to you. The Burton Group provide in-depth IT research and advisory services with a focus on strategic business technologies to executives and…

Rob de Veij has just uploaded a new version of RVTools, 2.7.1. So far over RVTools has been downloaded over 25000 times. Yes 25000 times, that is a lot isn’t it. There’s a good reason though that it is popular. It is easy to use and gives you all the details you are looking for. Version [...]

David Davis has put together a list of what he thinks is some of the best free virtualization tools avaiable. VMware vSphere ESXi Free Edition and VMware Go VMware vMA, vCLI (or command-line interface), PowerCLI, and scripts from the vGhetto script repository such as vSphereHealthCheck Veeam…

As a lot of others I was looking forward to the GA-date today of VMware View 4. Unfortunately VMware discovered some issues with the upgrade from view 3 to view 4 and postponed the release till next monday November 23rd. The planned paired release of vSphere 4.0 Update 1 remained unchanged –…

Sitting back and watching 2009 zoom past me, I noticed that the desktop virtualization market is finally beginning to grab hold within organizations. Media, analysts and vendors have been telling people about its technological wonders for years. But for one reason or another, it has taken all…

Part 4 of my backup products review has been released at SearchVMware.com. Follow the link below to see my reviews Backup and replication product review directoryI. Introduction II. Veeam Backup and...

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You have 2 days until our deadline. Get those entries in for your chance at $100.

Part 3 of my backup products review has been released at SearchVMware.com. Follow the link below to see my reviews Backup and replication product review directoryI. Introduction II. Veeam Backup and...

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In the Developer forum there was an interesting post called Resources for folks new to the vSphere Web Services SDK. Now unfortunately the Hello World guide was (again) only aimed at Java programmers. Although PowerCLI is nearing perfection, you sometimes will have to go to the SDK methods and…

VMware introduced vShield Zones as part of the vSphere release along with VMware Data Recovery as a value-added product that is available in certain editions. I’m always interested in virtualization security products so I spent a lot of time checking out the product which resulted in me writing a…

Running a lot of Red Hat VMs in your virtual infrastructure, on shared storage? CentOS, Scientific Linux, both versions 4 and 5, they count for these purposes; Fedora should likely be included too. Do you have the slocate (version 4.x and earlier) or mlocate (version 5.x) RPMs installed? If…

While the vSphere Client does install fine in Windows 7, it is when you attempt to connect to your vCenter Server that you discover there is a problem. VMware doesn't officially support the vSphere Client under Windows 7 but there is a workaround to make it work. In this video, I cover how to get…

While the vSphere Client does install fine in Windows 7, it is when you attempt to connect to your vCenter Server that you discover there is a problem. VMware doesn’t officially support the vSphere Client under Windows 7 but there is a workaround to make it work. In this video, I cover how to get…

Ok so the detective work was not 100% correct. If it was not for unforeseen circumstances then we should have had a release today

So why was there no release?

The only thing I found was from Andre Leibovici’s Blog

VMware uncovered some upgrade issues from View 3 to View 4 and the new unofficial…

From: http://dilbert.com/strips/comic/2009-11-19/ Related posts:Cloud Security Link Love: Monk Style…JERICHO FORUM AND CLOUD SECURITY ALLIANCE JOIN FORCES TO ADDRESS CLOUD COMPUTING SECURITYSecurity and the Cloud – What Does That Even Mean? Related posts:

1. Cloud Security Link Love: Monk…

On the 11th of December the anual Dutch VMUG conference will take place at the Nieuwegein Business Center. Over 600 Dutch VMware Warriors will make a plan to conquer the world, we are the new vikings or should I say vIkings? The final agenda has recently been published and judging on the names and…

While all of PowerCLI is remarkable in both it’s power and ease of use, there are some cmdlets that do not get as much airtime as they deserve. One of those, is Invoke-VMScript. From Get-Help InvokeVMScript NAME     Invoke-VMScript SYNOPSIS     Executes the specified PowerShell…

I had the opportunity recently to try to help a friend on his quest to P2V a Microsoft ISA Server.  We tried all sorts of different setting to allow communication between the ISA and in this case both Virtual Center and a Platespin server trying to get either one to ...

Today should be a big day for VMware! Today, 19th November, is the original date that VMware View 4 with PCoIP comes available. However, VMware uncovered some upgrade issues from View 3 to View 4 and the new unofficial date slipped to 23 November 2009, thus Andre Leibovici (Virtual Cloud)

Doing his very best to keep Event Logs everywhere pristine, Aaron Silber helps us knock out another pesky EventLog error : Not sure if this is an error that has something to do with machines created/deployed via Citrix Provisioning Services or just...

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<img>The President and Chief Operating Officer of Vizioncore, Chris Akerberg is currently in Sydney Australia so I look the opportunity to ask him some questions about the company and their products.

A CPU of the host is incompatible error appears and VMotion stops working after upgrading to vSphere 4.0 Just experienced this issue and found the resolution on VMware’s Kb 1011294 >> http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1011294 posted here…

Have you ever wondered how long it would take for a 12 year old child to configure a Drobo storage device? Well you are about to find out. In this short time lapse film you can see it for yourself!

Contributed article by Ken Oestreich, VP, Egenera Inc. Infrastructure Virtualization: The Next Logical Step 2010 will be an interesting year for... Read more at VMblog.com.<img>

Two great Videos from vmwaretv explains a great feature in vSpere: Distribuited Switch.


The theory:


the practice:


cheers
\mf

The best part of my job is working directly with customers, sharing what I know and learning new applications of UCS from them. This week I explored a brilliant use case for UCS with a customer – overcommitting blade resources for multi-tenant DR with Cisco UCS. If you provide DR for multiple…

Free backup tool GhettoVCB2 was released. There has been new version of free script for backing up the VMware’s free version of ESXi 4 . As you shoud know (and I’m sure you do), with the free version of ESXi you don’t have a console (unless you use the unsupported mode – not recommended,…

If you woke up this morning expecting to download and start the evaluations your own VMware View 4.0 and PCoIP QA session you will be disappointed. VMware uncovered some upgrade issues from View 3 to View 4 and the new unofficial date slipped to Monday 23/11. It also looks like the vSphere 4.0…

I have received questions about thin provisioned disk performance since we announced their full support in vSphere.  The questions usually center around scalability issues.  VMware’s customers fear locking contention as new blocks are created for growing disks and think that growing thin disks…

Work is currently underway to make some improvements and fixes to the user experience on VMware Communities following the recently launched new site design. Most of these improvements are in response to requests made at Communities Website Feedback, and based on those requests, we've prioritized…

Well, I thought it would be nice to discuss the attributes and features of VMware View4 new PCoIP protocol which will be released very shortly. In case you don’t PCoIP stands for PC over IP - and then intention is to deliver remote display protocol which rivals “legacy” thin-client protocols…

  I’m currently doing some work on SSD storage and virtual machines so I need an easy way of comparing I/O performance between a couple of virtual machines, each backed onto different types of storage. I normally use IOmeter for this kind of work but generally only in a standalone manner – i.e…

No official sources, but a small bit of detective work.

I hate rumors, but it has already started on Twitter.

Trickles of info also from here  and here.

The talk is that View 4.0 will only work with ESX(i) 4 Update 1. View will be released tomorrow.

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From the View Press Release

Pricing and…

Kind of a weird topic for a Podcast but this week the discussions was around the “VMworld Booth Rack at Gestalt IT Tech Field Day”. As always you can download this episode here and I have gathered the following links which were posted during in the chat window: VMETC – MDS and Xsigo Power…

Connecting VMware iSCSI sessions to COMSTAR or any iSCSI target provider securely is required to maintain a reliable system. Without some level of initiator to target connection gate keeping we will eventually encounter a security event. This can happen from a variety of sources, for example…

In a previous entry (see Events: a great source of information – Part 1) I showed how to use the VmCreatedEvent event to find out which guests were created longer than 30 days ago. In the vSphere SDK documentation there are currently 432 events listed. That makes it sometimes hard to decide which…

Recently I installed three equal IBM server x 3650 machines with VMware and installed and connected two QLogic HBA’s in each server. After installing ESX I ran into a problem with one of the machines trying to connect to the datastores. Two of the machines perfectly could see all presented luns…

I recently completed a VMware VI 3.5 to vSphere upgrade in a small environment (5 hosts, 80 VM’s).  Being a small environment, the upgrade was planned for one big overnight blitz.  Unfortunately, the size of the environment did not afford a test environment to uncover potential issues before the…

Yes i know, it’s been a while since my last post anyway . In a few days I’ll be heading back to my hometown of Sydney (via Tokyo – I love Japan) for a few weeks, so the internets will be a little less ranty for a little while. And unfortunately, I’ll be missing the [...]

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So far we have dedicated a lot of space to Oracle, in terms of what virtualization offering it could provide and what mistakes may compromise its presence as a relevant player.

The Sun acquisition has not closed yet, so the company cannot disclose any specific plan. Without concrete…

From the time I was little I was always taught to be prepared. I took outdoor survival classes and first aid courses in the evenings long before I was old enough to drive. My vehicles have extra tools in them. When mountain biking in Moab I carried enough equipment to rebuild a small nuclear…

William Lam just updated two of his most popular scripts. If you haven’t looked at them yet, make sure you do as they are worth it. ghettoVCB(g2) enables the backup of virtual machines residing on either an ESX or ESXi host. ghettoVCBg2 is a complete rewritten and enhanced version of ghettoVCB or…

Anyone doubting that 2010 will be an inflection point on solid-state storage? We now have consumer-grade 40GB drive at $115 (talked about here), and a 1TB drive at $3.5K. http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1562474/one-terabyte-ssd-hits-shops While these are consumer drives, and are missing the…

In my new VirtualizationAdmin.com article, I cover how to configure VMware ESX Server Alarms properly. For example, the difference between defined alarms and triggered alarms, and how alarms work in the vSphere heirarchy. Read the full artile at- Learn how to configure VMware ESX Server Alarms

Finally everyone outside the closed beta is now able to get hands on with the cool application Project Onyx. Thanks to Carter Shanklin Project overview - Got it from http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/1330-Project-Onyx-Alpha-Release.html Onyx is a standalone application that serves as a proxy between…

Originally VMware planned to expire Enterprise licensing on Dec. 12, 2009. Plans have changed, but upgrading later could be drastically more expensive. Meanwhile, VMware still isn't paying enough attention to the SMB market, which it needs to if it wants to stay on top.

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The analyst industry is telling us that unstructured data growth is going to outpace that of transactional based data. "While transactional data is still projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of 21.8%, it’s far outpaced by a 61.7% CAGR predicted for unstructured data in traditional…

VMware vSphere 4 supports a range of hot storage management technologies: vStorage VMFS Volume Grow Hot Extend for Virtual Disks Hot Virtual Disk Add/Remove With these capabilities, if space gets tight in your vSphere environment, it is easy to be proactive and address the issue before anyone…

  If you are a VCP3 you’ll need to get a move on and upgrade your certification to VCP4 unless you have time to sit (and pay for) some classroom training next year – you need to have passed the exam before December 31st 2009 (i.e in 43 days time!) Also bear in mind there might be [...]

I called this one back in February! http://www.vmwareinfo.com/2009/02/duplicate-sids-big-deal-why-you-might.html and Aaron Silber sent me over this note to confirm it! :) Looks like our old friend has been put to bed. ...

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What is VMware HealthAnalyzer? VMware HealthAnalyzer automates the collection of VMware Infrastructure or VMware vSphere inventory, configuration and utilization data, analyzes data and recommends grades, and generates a report card that presents data categorized by VMware Health Check best…

Today I needed to disable the VMware tools/console copy & paste functionality… on a lot of VMs (well… more than one is a lot). In doing this, I came across these directions from vmzare: How To disable copy and paste operations between the guest operating system and remote console ? 1. Log on to…

This is Virtualization Short Take #31, another installation in my irregularly-published series of articles that share useful or interesting links in the world of virtualization.

This article was originally posted on blog.scottlowe.org. Visit the site for more information on virtualization, servers,…

What do Virtualization and Cloud executives think about 2010? Find out in this VMblog.com series exclusive. Contributed article by Lilac Berniker,... Read more at VMblog.com.<img>

Vmware vCenter Linked Mode enables a common inventory view across multiple instances of vCenter Server. Over the last year Ive deployed a number of VI3 systems with Site Recovery Manager in the mix and one of the things that always annoyed me was having to manage each site separately. Now with…

A collegue of mine just gave a me a few tips on how to view the logfiles on an ESX Host in Real-time. Normally I would export all of the logs via the VIC or the vm-support command. But this limits me to only seeing what has happened, not what is currently happening. Using the VMware [...]

Herco van Brug wrote a great article on how to build a solid VDI/View Windows XP Template. Herco recently designed and implemented a large View environment and this article is the outcome. I only quoted the first paragraph as the article is subject to change. Please visit the source article for the…

I finally found sometime to finalise the third and last part of this article. 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 -  and in the second part…

The past few days the experts from inPeople and inVirtualize have been working on their Nehalem Whitebox. This great setup with an Intel Core i7 975 Extreme 1366 processor has the pleasure to ultra-fast take use of the enclosed 16Gbyte of memory. Of course they've added some other speedy goodies…

A fellow VMware enthusiast and personal friend Simon Seagrave, has announced that his website http://www.techhead.co.uk has been shortlised for a Computer Weekly Blog Award. The actual award title is: Individual IT Professional Male If you haven’t seen the TechHead website, you really should get…

Project ONYX is a very interesting initiative from The PowerCLI team. What is Onyx and how it can helps you to write scripts. I never write scripts. I’m not a programmer. The only think I can do is to adapt existing scripts a little.. that’s all. I’m sure that I’m not alone. Not everyone…

  One of the main things I miss as I switch between a Mac and PC is the lack of decent multi-window manager support in Windows – alt-tab and win-tab are great but I find them cumbersome. A particular bug bear of mine is if you have to manage multiple terminal services sessions to servers/virtual…

Windows Server 2008 R2 brings big improvements in the virtualization area. Learn about Hot-Add VM Storage, Enhanced Processor Support, Enhanced Networking Support, Cluster Shared Volumes (CSV), Live Migration and more...

Small, popular storage device has lots going for it, as well as shortcoming or two.

Mesh-active technology is key for 3PAR.

I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again: Don’t underestimate Microsoft and the potential disruption Azure will deliver.* You might not get Microsoft’s strategy for Azure. Heck, much of Microsoft may not get Microsoft’s strategy for Azure, but one thing is for sure: Azure will be THE…

Have you ever had the issue of wanting to go into the console of a Linux Virtual Machine that is running at RUNLEVEL 5 (GUI) - because you are one of those Linux geeks who think that GUI is for the weak?

Seriously though - sometimes you need to access the console - to try and fix up something that…

I do like advertising from time to time. I think advertising gives away a lot about how companies operate and what their internal values are. You also find out if the company understands their market and their potential users. When looking for VMware View articles with Google I came across an ad for…

I was talking with some friends, a project manager, a few windows server guys and a CIO, we had met for drinks at one of the pubs in the city to see how we were all getting on. Anyway, one of the server guys was telling us: “How ridiculous it is that we’re moving servers from [...] Related…

Rackspace is now taking names for their beta program for Cloud Servers for Windows. They plan to launch the beta in early 2010 with competitive pricing (vs their Linux servers): Cloud Servers for Windows Server Size Hourly Charge 512 MB $ 0.04 1 GB $ 0.08 2 GB $ 0.16 4 GB $…

Recently there are some request from my client who suggested to have their production and DR site to be automated protected and fail over in the event of disaster. VMware SRM seems to be right choice for most of the time, but these clients are decided to bring it to another level of fail over [...]…

  The esteemed Mr Techhead and I will be presenting on how to build a low-cost lab environment for work, study and play at this month’s VMUG in London. We will be bringing our own equipment and hope to have lots of (working!) demos of what you can do with low-cost server kit and interesting…

Welcome back to Storage Short Takes! Here's a collection of recently-uncovered storage-related links, posts, and articles. I hope you find something useful or interesting.

This article was originally posted on blog.scottlowe.org. Visit the site for more information on virtualization, servers,…

Sam Jacobs dropped this quick note on me this week. “I have been noticing an increasing number of posts on the Citrix forums concerning issues with the 11.2 version of the ICA client.  One issue that has come up repeatedly, is the...

[[More information after the jump - Visit…

I came across this one a little while back and was hoping it would be fixed in V2, I haven’t seen anyone else mention it so I thought I would add it to my blog as a warning to other PowerShell freaks like me…. I have changed the example to be more universal so you get [...]

As more software vendors support their applications running in virtual machines, VMware has extended its VMware Ready logo to these applications.

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The PowerCLI Team yesterday published with the Onyx Project a great tool with lots of potential. The blogging community received Carter’s announcement enthousiastically (see for example The Onyx has landed). As a casual PowerCLI user you might think, the product has a strange name but it is the…

VMware have recently announced the latest release of it’s desktop virtualization product, VMware View 4 with the GA being on the 19th November. This version of VMware View includes the PCoIP Protocol from Teredici which greatly assists in the smooth streaming of desktop video over varying…

When I tried to Storage vMotion a VM to another LUN I got an “operation timed out error”: After analyzing the vpxd.log, I found the following lines: The best part I found out, is that the VM was rolled back to it’s old location without losing data or getting corrupt. This problem is…

After you’ve spent the time installing VMware Data Recovery (vDR), you may find that some of the defaults do not work well. Some of these, like the retention policies are an easy change. Others, like the behavior of the vDR appliance, however, are a bit more difficult. To that end, you can create…

The past weekend I’ve delivered a special edition of the VMware vSphere What’s New training for the VMware gurus working at inPeople. The What’s New training is a hands-on training course which explores new features in VMware vCenter Server 4 and ESX/ESXi 4, as well as how to upgrade to VMware…

The PowerCLI Team yesterday published with the Onyx Project a great tool with lots of potential. The blogging community received Carter’s announcement enthousiastically (see my previous post The Onyx has landed). As a casual PowerCLI user you might think, the product has a strange name but it is…

What do Virtualization and Cloud executives think about 2010? Find out in this VMblog.com series exclusive. Contributed article by Zvi Guterman, CEO... Read more at VMblog.com.<img>

Are you curious to hear where virtualization and cloud company executives believe the industry is headed in 2010? Following up on last year's... Read more at VMblog.com.<img>

Deploying UCS Blade Server with UCS Manager for Virtualization

With the one-liner below, you’re able to create an overview of your VM’s, Clusters, ESX Hosts and Datastores. Get-VM | Select Name, @{N="Cluster";E={Get-Cluster -VM $_}}, ` @{N="ESX Host";E={Get-VMHost -VM $_}}, ` @{N="Datastore";E={Get-Datastore -VM $_}} The following output will be generated:…

If you are following me on twitter, you must have noticed that every now and again I tweet about a new vSphere book, and then one day later someone will blog about it (the book not my tweet of course ) For a change, and to get myself used to short blog posts (without all [...]

New Book: VMware…

http://www.realwire.com/release_detail.asp?ReleaseID=14283 Supercomputing 2009, Portland Oregon; 17th November 2009: Iceotope (www.iceotope.com) today launched its new liquid-cooled server technology. The system is believed to be the first to use modular “liquid immersion” of the server…

Last week Microsoft announced something called Windows MultiPoint Server 2010 , a technology for classrooms that lets up to ten students use individual terminals to share the resources of one single host computer. In technical terms you could think of...(read more)<img><img>

Carter Shanklin just announced the release of Project Onyx. She his post here: http://blogs.vmware.com/vipowershell/2009/11/project-onyx-is-here.html Download the zip file from here: http://tinyurl.com/ygayony extract the zip file and start Onyx.exe. If you’re starting Onyx from your c: drive and…

New performance whitepaper from VROOM blog . If you ever doubted any performance issues due to using Thin provisioned disks, you should read this whitepaper. In fact there are just very little performance loss (if any) when using thin disks. The benefit of using thin disks over thick disks is quite…

A few months ago we announced a very exciting new application we call “Project Onyx”. To put it simply, Project Onyx is a script recorder for vSphere Client. Since then my inbox has been flooded with requests from all over...

For those of you following along at home, the A6 (Audit, Assertion, Assessment, and Assurance API) Working Group is Live. I’ve setup the Google group so please join & read the introduction here. Hope to see you there. /Hoff Related posts:Follow-On: The Audit, Assertion, Assessment, and Assurance…

The VMworld 2009 Hands on Labs (HOL) VI was not the only VMware Global Engineering Technical Operations Team (GETO) managed infrastructure at the Moscone Center in 2009. The VMware Cloud Pavilion Booth and it’s demos, some customer demos, and even the VMTN Lounge and vExpert booth (I used…

I thought I’d give an update on some of the new things happening on this website. The vLaunchpad has been updated and over-hauled, the blog roll has been alphabetized for easier viewing. I’ve added a new Storage blogs category since virtualization and storage seem to be so closely tied to each…

vStorage Thin Provisioning, a key component of VMware vSphere™, is a technology that redefines storage provisioning by allocating space on demand to the virtual disks. We recently published a paper that gives the details of this feature and discusses experiments...

A couple of months ago Carter Shanklin (Product Manager of Automating the World) teased us all with a wonderful application which creates PowerCLI scripts for you by tracing your actions in the vCenter Client. The scripts it produces are not PowerCLI perfect but they do produce a raw format of a…

Carter Shanklin just released the alpha version of project Onyx trough Twitter and YouTube. Onyx generates PowerShell code to help you solve your toughest automation challenges. See the full demonstration with a complete explanation of how to use Onyx at YouTube. Once you have downloaded Project…

I have been waiting for this ever since it was announced at VMWorld 2009.

Carter Shanklin just announced tonight!

Been waiting to try "Project Onyx" the PowerCLI script generator for VMware vSphere? Check out http://is.gd/4Wxmc

Here is a small Demo

Go forth and PowerCLI'ze !!

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This week VMware will release VMware View 4, “the industry’s first purpose built solution for delivering desktops as a managed service” as VMware calls it. I don’t know about that, but at least this release is a step in the right direction. The 2 big improvements View 4 brings are the new…

The moment is here, XenDesktop 4 is available! Much awaited and true to their promise Citrix has just officially made XenDesktop 4 available for download on the download page of MyCitrix.com : http://www.citrix.com/English/ss/downloads/results.asp?productID=163057 (you need to be registered and…

On October 26th, I sat the VCDX Administration Exam. Today I received notification that I passed.

Now if you were following me on Twitter then you would have seen that I was not at all happy with the feeling I left the Exam with.

My experience.

It was taken in the Pearson testing Center in Tel-…

I’ve been working hard on creating the supplementary page that I discussed and asked for feedback here. I’ve been concentrating on the areas which are mentioned in the VCP4 blueprints, but are not covered in the card at the moment.  These are core parts of vSphere, but a probably not as…

In the last week these items are added or edited in VMware’s Knowledgebase at http://kb.vmware.com VMware FusionCreating a custom virtual machine in Fusion (1013810)Date Published: 11/11/2009 VMware vCenter OrchestratorvCenter Orchestrator fails to install when Terminal Server is running…

Just a quick post to remind those of you in the South of England that the London based VMware Users Group is happening Tuesday 24th November. Simon Gallagher (vinf.net) and myself (Simon Seagrave) will be presenting a session on putting together and running your own VMware vSphere home or work…

This week's VMware at-a-glance news roundup includes AT&T's venture into the cloud, how users responded to the Virtual Computing Environment initiative, VMware Ready software and middleware, View 4 and more.

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<img>The Dutch VMUG conference will take place at the Nieuwegein Business Center. On the 11th of December over 600 enthusiastic Vmug members will enjoy a day full of virtualization. For the fifth year in succession you can attend a lot of really technical sessions. So if you are living near…

One aspect of virtual machines that often leads to confusion is the snapshot. What is a snapshot? How do snapshots work? What products use the snapshot feature? What files are involved in snapshots? These questions and more are all discussed...

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In the last two years Cisco made at least two long-term key investments in the server market: invested over $150 million in VMware and became a player with its own blade system Unified Computing System (UCS).

Cisco wants to sell and interconnect next generation data centers. To do so it…

Today, 16th November 2009, Citrix XenDesktop 4 is available for download from the MyCitrix downloads page. Citrix XenDesktop 4 is a groundbreaking new product that makes virtual desktops a mainstream reality for hundreds of millions of corporate users for the first time ever. Unlike first-generation…

I received a package on Friday from Chad Sakac and EMC.  I’d like to start by saying Thank You for the most excellent piece of equipment. I didn’t have much time to work with it this weekend, given that I was floating around the Gulf of Mexico when my IX4-200d arrived.  Couple the cruise with…

I had an interesting revelation this morning: VMware's own actions are legitimizing their competition and removing one of their competitive advantages.

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

VMware Fusion Creating a custom virtual machine in Fusion (1013810) Date Published: 11/11/2009 VMware vCenter Orchestrator vCenter Orchestrator fails to install when Terminal Server is running (1015658) Date Published: 11/13/2009 VMware vCenter Update Manager Cannot scan ESX hosts after using...

Written by Aaron Silber : If anyone has recently upgraded their Citrix client you find (or not be able to find!) that Citrix has removed a lot from Program Neighborhood. As a matter of fact there is no Program Neighborhood anymore! Citrix wants...

[[More information after the jump - Visit…

Nowadays more and more companies have or are considering a 2nd datacenter in another site. Mostly the main reason for this 2nd datacenter is for disaster recovery purposes. There are 2 ways to utilize this 2nd datacenter. First one could choose for an active-passive setup, where in the 2nd…

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At the end of October VMware released its first capacity planning tool: CapacityIQ.

As always happens when a market leader expands into a new segment, its previous partners suddenly turn into competitors.
Some of them are able to keep the pace and deliver value on top of the new…

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At the end of August, Citrix announced a new major effort around Xen and cloud computing to counter the release of VMware vCloud Express.

The details of this project were scarce at that time and beyond the name, Xen Cloud Platform (XCP), and the intent to integrate new and existing…

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Last week, at its TechEd Conference in Berlin, Microsoft published updated roadmaps for most of its products.
The most interesting one from a virtualization perspective is the one about System Center family.

It seems that Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) will not receive any major…

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Five months after the first beta, Microsoft is ready to push out the beta 2 of Visual Studio Team System 2010 Lab Management, a special version of the popular IDE that interacts with Hyper-V R2 and System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) 2008 R2 to provide a fully featured…

GestaltIT Tech Field Day is over, and the attendees and sponsors have indicated they were extremely pleased with the event. This is not to say that everything went well the whole time. In fact, if you followed along on the social media conversation then you caught some interesting tweets and replies…

Intel and Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) are calling a truce and burying the legal hatchet with one another. In a move to clear up a long-standing allegation that Intel has abused monopoly power to thwart competition, Intel will pay rival chipmaker AMD the sum of $1.25 billion to settle all…

Happy days? Why you ask. Well ditching your Windows laptop and moving to a Macbook Pro with Fusion is happy days!

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Last week VMware finally released the much awaited View 4.0, which supports vSphere 4.0 and introduces the software-only version of the Teradici remote desktop protocol PCoIP.

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VMware is offering two versions of View 4: Enterprise (which includes…

There has been held an Virtualization event in Prague (Czech Republic) the 3rd of this months called Virtualization Forum 2009. One of the attendants Petr Buchmaier is also an author of Czech website windowsportal.cz with a virtualization section.  Even though the websites are in Czech language and…

Since last week I’ve got a new assignment which is a long way from home. Next to the downsides of traveling 5 hours a day and staying in hotels, it certainly has advantages. During my 5 hour drive or when I’m staying in a hotel i have time to listen to the VMware Community Roundtable podcasts…

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Last week Lanamark, another startup that, like VKernel, could be impacted by the launch of VMware CapacityIQ, released Suite 2009 R2.

And like VKernel, Lanamark is looking around, introducing support for Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V, along with refreshed support for VMware (now up to…

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Just a few weeks after the release of VMware Fusion 3.0, Parallels answers with Desktop for Mac 5.0.

The company released the previous edition of this hosted virtualization platform exactly one year ago.

The new version 5.0 focuses on performance, claiming a 300% improvement on…

One of the promises of VDI has always been that it’s "cheaper" than traditional PCs. (Actually, that's a promise of server-based computing in general, not just VDI.) Anyone who's looked into this quickly learns there are two kinds...(read more)<img><img>

If that title won’t have my mother calling me… Well, at least it someone’s attention. Prior to VMware Player 3.0 I never gave it much time of day. Sure it worked, and sure there was a way to work around the create VM limitation and the like, but it just wasn’t… well, you got [...]

As I continue working with VMware’s Professional Services Organization (PSO) as they develop a performance troubleshooting service, I see repeats of a theme I wrote about a couple of months ago:  storage is causing most performance problems, not VMware.  In fact, I have yet to see a correctly-…

RT @cswolf: just in time for the holidays. VKernel giving away Capacity Modeler – http://bit.ly/OhWTL. Going to use it as X-Mas gift… # RT @rspruijt: # Citrix XD support for Novell http://bit.ly/25tiqn; # RT @jtroyer: Wednesday on VMware Community podcast live noon PST – VMware View 4…

This friday I received a package. I felt 10-years old again, it was like unwrapping a Christmas present. One hell of a Christmas present I must say and I want to thank EMC and especially Chad Sakac! I un-boxed the two Iomega IX4-200d units and turned them on. After a couple of minutes I had [...]

Last week we started an experiment where we're publishing audio version of our daily articles in a sort of daily podcast. These are "real" audio versions, with Gabe or me actually recording ourselves explaining the articles. We attach the...(read more)<img><img>

On the Yellow Bricks blog there was today a very interesting entry called Performance : Thin Provisioning. Besides the link to the excellent VMware document called Performance Study of VMware vStorage Thin Provisioning, Duncan also included some tips and tricks. Since I’m in favour of automating…

Take a 9 minute drive around the storage block with Marc Farley of 3PAR as he uses an analogy of mismatched socks to explain how Autonomic Storage can eliminate human error in storage provisioning for virtual servers and databases. In the beginning of the video Marc goes off on a tangent Twitter…

As virtualization continues to seep into every crack of the data center, the search for virtualization talent continues to grow and becomes much more Read more at VMblog.com.<img>

It was a normal week again. No exciting announcements just business as usual. Luckily there are always bloggers who publish articles with refreshing views, new technical details or old technical details overhauled. It wasn't difficult to pick this weeks top-5,...

I had a discussion about Thin Provisioning with a colleague last week. One of the reasons for me not to recommend it yet for high I/O VMs was performance. I had not seen a white-paper or test yet that showed their was little impact of growing the VMDK. Eric Gray of Vcritical.com had the scoop, [...]

It has almost been one year since I started being able to use the PCoIP software implementation we have been collaborating on. There has been a lot of questions about how is PCoIP for WAN delivered desktops?

There is no doubt or question delivering a desktop experience across the WAN is one of the…

Why using RSS is crucial these days? Since the beginning of this resource website the main reason was to share informations. We live in a world where the informations are in quantity easy accessible and reachable. So if you interest only let say in Server Virtualization. Then you start goggling…

Thin disk provisioning is a fully-supported feature in vSphere 4 that can save tons of storage space on your SAN by allowing virtual disks to consume storage space as needed instead all at once. Under the supervision of VMware vCenter Server, ESX 4 thin provisioning is safe and reliable even for…

  Here are some additional interesting facts or tips to complete the excellent list already compiled by Rodney Haywood (@rodos).   Licence Numbers are specific to each physical system’s serial number. Virtual Media Server only mount ISO/IMG files hosted locally  in your workstation (no Map or…

PR Newswire ARMONK, N.Y., Nov. 13 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — IBM ( IBM) today introduced IBM Virtual Server Security for VMware® vSphere(TM), a software product designed to help organizations secure and protect their virtual server infrastructure. The software will help safeguard virtual server…

Following the crowd/trend, starting from the cool new themes of Boche.Net/Blog and Yellow-Bricks.com all the way to the impressive new look and feel of VMware’s website, it’s right about time to refresh my 11 month old theme! I tried to keep the original logo and colors as much as I could. No…

I get this question all of the time in one form or another, so I’m trying to determine hypervisor costs for a SMB as if I’m the owner looking to implement virtualization. This is an academic exercise, so pretend it’s your company and your money and you don’t have a particular vendor…

As the official download count for V1 of my PowerPack has now hit over 1000 downaloads (I cant thank you all enough), I have now released V2 of my PowerPack for VESI and PowerGUI, this is more like the version I wanted to release first time around. In the first PowerPack, I took a fair few [...]

In the My PS … series of blog entries this entry lists the SnapIns and Modules I use (regularly). Note that the following list is my personal list and that it is definitely not my aim to list all available PowerShell snapins and modules. That would be a sheer impossible task, seen the abundance of…

Some time ago, in my Desktops R Us post,  I argued for a new vision of delivering applications via desktops in the enterprise.  But how do you get to that vision? Note, when I last talked about Desktop-as-a-Service (DaaS) people immediately thought I was talking about Cloud, but I wasn’t…

This week a colleague called me with a VMware ESX problem. He’s doing a Exchange 2007 implementation and he configured a virtual machine which should function as the Mailbox server. He was complaining that the virtual machine took 13 to 15 minutes just to boot and he suspected a storage issue as…

From time to time you need to locate stuff in the service console and the only command you got is find. 'Locate' unfortunately hasn't been included in the COS. Typically, I forget the syntax and think of another way of locating files - but actually it's pretty simple.

Did you know that VIMA has been renamed to vMA ? Or do you have any idea what VIMA and vMA are and how they can help you manage your vSphere infrastructure from the command line? Read my new article – Using the new VMware vSphere Management Assistant (vMA) – to find out the answers to [...]

Today, Friday the 13th, I did my VCP 4 exam. I was a bit nervous as I, literally, only had a couple of hours to prepare. I did however pass. Because I only had a couple of hours to prepare I focused on what I expected to be the most difficult part to score on, [...]

The days here are Tech Field Day have been very packed and exciting.    The conversations have been diving very deep into storage related discussions.  Not really my bag of tricks at that level but interesting for me none the less.  At the 3PAR...

[[More information after the jump - Visit…

The default GUI install of ESX4 makes the /tmp partition 1GB and even then it is only categorized as optional.  I’ve been asked several times why you’d want to make /tmp any bigger.  If it fills up you just clear it out, right? Well here’s a good reason.  It seems that VUM (vCenter Update…

VMware vShield Zones, a new security service for vSphere, ensures strict compliance with security policies and industry regulations for user data as customers adopt cloud computing with virtual environments for increased efficiency and flexibility. Previously, compliance required diverting network…

This was my first ‘Tech Field Day’.  I was not sure what to expect and at first it seemed like the beginning of a strange Technology Reality TV Show.  Everyone loaded up on a bus, most meeting for the first time only hours before and headed to a...

[[More information after the jump - Visit…

Cisco had officially launched the Palo adapter for their UCS platform. Now you will have more choice to select the adapter to be used by the UCS platform. While I am searching more information on the net to compare about the different within Palo and Menlo, I found this great article which provide a…

Day 2 – Here We Go Again! I’m throwing in the towel on trying to live blog/journal Tech Field Day. The event is too engaging and it’s all I can do to keep up with the conversation on Twitter while actually trying to learn so much new technology and products. As in Day 1, please check [...]

Yesterday was the first day of the Gestalt IT Field Days.

My background is Fibre Channel and beginning 2009 I implemented a large iSCSI environment. The “other” storage protocol supported by VMware, NFS, is rather unknown to me. And to be honest I really tried to keep away from it as much as possible, thinking it was not a proper enterprise worthy…

I just wanted to write a couple of lines about Resource Pools. During most engagements I see environments where Resource Pools have been implemented together with shares. These Resource Pools are usually labeled “Low”, “Normal” and “High” with the shares set respectively. This is the…

Zoals Arne, Bouke en Viktor, Ivo, Eric, Arnim, Duncan en Gerben al besproken hebben vindt op 11 december 2009 het jaarlijkse Dutch VMUG Event 2009 plaats! Dit jaar is het extra feest, want het evenement wordt voor de vijfde keer georganiseerd! Het evenement staat dit jaar uiteraard in het teken van…

I attended a local party held by Arrow ECS in Copenhagen last night, and several awards were given out during the party. One award stood out to me, of course, which this blog post is about. My company was nominated in the category of VMware Partner of the Year in Denmark with 3 other of our…

VMware VCP-410 passed I don’t think that there is many people like me. Just look. I was born in Czech Republic, then with the life going on I’m now French and I live at a beautiful Tropical Island called Reunion (FR) in Indian Ocean. For your information it’s close to Mauritius. Anyway. Since…

  After attending the VMware View 4 Talkshoe podcast the following information about the announced VMware  View 4 was discussed: VM’s per core: VM’s per core, In VMware View 3 the number was 6-9 VM’s per core, now in View 4 with for example the Intel Nehalem processors you can get to 12-16…

Recently we announced VMware View 4. One of the most exciting and fulfilling things for the RDE team and myself was the collaboration with our partner Teradici to bring a software implementation of a next generation display protocol ( PCoIP ) to market. It has been a lot of work, on a really…

• NetApp - Hardware Universe Sectional Guides (login required)
  This page (NOW login required) has documentation and reference sheets for NetApp hardware, including controllers, shelves, drives, and adapter cards.

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Windows OEM license installed on physical Server can’t really be P2V. Or yes? It just came it as an evidence for me because it already happened to me in my production environment several times, but it’s not evident for everybody. So just a little remember. Especially when you are just started…

I wrote about VMware’s View 4 announcement on Monday. Since then there have been a lot of questions raised. I’ve managed to get answers to some, and I’m working on getting answers to the rest. But I figured that for today I’d update...(read more)<img><img>

Sitting in an impressive room at the Google campus in Mountain View last month, I asked the collective group of brainpower a slightly rhetorical question: How much longer do you feel pure-play Infrastructure-As-A-Service will be a relevant service model within the spectrum of cloud services? I…

I’ll be participating in the Advanced Enterprise Virtualization seminars with Brian Madden and Eric Henderson in Los Angeles, Columbus and Chicago. Hope to see you there! Here is more information. Related Posts: VDI Can Alleviate Commuting Costs VMWare, Please clarify who can attend VMWorld…

techtarget.com has very kindly taken one of my chapters from my soon to be released book on vSphere4. The chapter was original meant to be VMware View3. Unfortunately, because of length and publishing deadlines - the VMware View3 chapter didn’t make the final cut my book. So techtarget.com very…

I was recently asked about which one is better – XenDesktop or View? Here is the link: http://snipurl.com/t7efi Related Posts: XenDesktop Demo Free XenDesktop Training Citrix Announces 3D Capabilities in XenDesktop: 10x Less Bandwidth VDI Can Alleviate Commuting Costs Citrix Partners React to…

Posted by Rick Jackson Chief Marketing Officer At VMworld 2009 this past September, we rolled out an updated VMware logo as a predecessor to our overall re-branding efforts. The obvious change that most people saw and commented on was the...

I have been writing on ESX command line stuff for far too long now. I just need to finish it before ESX 5 comes out with no command line support and my year long series is rendered obsolete before it is finished. Here is a few more commands from ESX 3.5u4. They are [...]

Fading Type 2 hypervisor receives dull update.

Checking out Xsigo at Gestalt IT Field Day

Download the report here: I was talking with Finlay MacLeod about his views on the changing nature of IT, how we need to think about the ever increasing pressures on cost reduction combined with sustaining service delivery at commercial grade pricing.  It was very interesting, the following are a…

Congratulations to Scott Sauer. He is the winner of our fourth cycle of the vSphere blog contest. His entry is shown below and can also be found at: http://www.virtualinsanity.com/index.php/2009/10/12/get-thin-provisioning-working-for-you-in-vsphere/ Get Thin Provisioning working for you in vSphere…

Computer Weekly The reduction in demand for IT products and services as businesses cut spending is constricting supplier innovation and reducing choice for IT project leaders. Research by BT Global Services indicates that 80% of UK managers are preparing to sweat their IT assets. While 75%…

If you're concerned about the ostensible 'limitations' of ESXi – VMware's scaled-down free hypervisor – an expert outlines ESXi's core features and compares ESXi and ESX.

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An expert outlines VMware ESX features and ESX hardware compatibility and installation concerns.

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VMware High Availability (VMHA) is a key disaster recovery tool, enabling failover of virtual machines to another physical host in a cluster -- as well as VM monitoring. But it has some limitations compared with other fault tolerance technologies.

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Perplexed by the steady stream of VMware products? This overview dissects VMware features and product bundles and helps identify if VMware suits your virtualization environment.

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Regardless of the connection broker used, VMware's ESX hypervisor still trumps Citrix XenServer in VDI environments.

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One common area of confusion for many is around Microsoft Windows Operating System (OS) licensing.  I think you’ll agree it is a little less confusing than it has been in years gone by though it is still seen as something of a dark art especially with the introduction of running hosted…

Day 1 – Good Morning Silicon Valley! Today is day one of the Tech Field Day and I am about to head downstairs to the hotel lobby to meet up with the group, jump on the bus, and head to our first destination – VMware’s Briefing Center in Palo Alto. My flight was one of the [...]

The HP and 3Com deal reinforces something Scott McNealy said 10 years ago - 'The Network is the Computer' although with today's hype cycles I would replace 'computer' with 'cloud'.

I am working on a series that will be at least two parts, maybe three, on the single most overlooked piece of the cloud…

I was installing a new ESX Host today, and before putting it into Production, I wanted to test that the Network Failover was working correctly.

Now instead of going over to the server and pulling out network cables, I started to think, there must be a way to do this (like all good administrators do)…

Aren’t we human beings curious things?  We hold on to the past with one hand while grasping at the future with the other, completely oblivious to the present that is happening before us. This post is my insight into how things are changing now in the present IT industry and how Protocol…

11 December aanstaande is het weer tijd voor het jaarlijkse VMUG event.  De voorlopige agenda staat al een tijdje online en wordt per week beter en beter.  Wat het leuke aan dit event is dat er  presentaties worden gegeven door mensen uit de communitie zelf. Eric Sloof, Viktor van den Berg, Joep…

  On a new Windows Server 2003 server without the VMware Tools installed, there are no TimeOut settings configured. You can find this setting in the following registry key: HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\System\CurrentControlSet\Services\Disk\ The picture below, you’ll see the default settings from…

Have you ever wanted to check your Network throughput between your ESX Hosts? or even between VM’s? Well I needed to do this, and I couldn’t find any straight forward how-to’s. Having been pointed in the direction of a simple application called IPerf by Simon Gallagher I opted to use the…

vmuglogo11 December zal er een nieuw, fris VMUG evenement plaatsvinden in Nieuwegein. Tot 600 man kunnen meedoen aan coole, informatieve sessies. Er zijn in totaal 15 parallelle sessies en ik weet zeker dat er iets bij zit voor jou! Daarnaast vind je er vele sponsors op de beursvloer zoals: VMware,…

As reported on vreference.com, there is a dangerous default in ESX 4. Before I expand on this potential problem I want to point out that a bug report has been files with VMware for correcting this in future releases, but for now VI admins need to be aware of the issue – If the key [...]

When you want to run VI client on Windows 7 recently released or on Windows 2008 Server R2 The problem was know for some time now, and the bloggers community found a workarround quite quickly. VMware was a bit late to officially fix this trouble with this official KB article: Cannot launch vSphere…

A quick and (somewhat) dirty video of the ThinApp Side-by-Side Updating feature used for updating deployed ThinApp packaged apps - typically ones deployed to or accessed from LAN Workstations, View Desktops, or even Terminal Servers. This feature enables updating of the packaged applications - even…

A reader was recently reading the VMware white paper  What Is New in VMware vSphere 4: Storage and he came across this paragraph: Improved Storage Resources Control As the scope of storage resources have increased significantly with large deployments of virtualization environments, so has the need…

VMware will be performing a system upgrade to several VMware Web applications on November 15, 2009. Maintenance will begin at 5:00 a.m. Pacific Standard Time (PST) and end at approximately 9:00 a.m. PST. While this upgrade is in progress, you...

One benefit of virtualization that is often stated is that by virtualizing you will reduce the number of administrators needed to manage your server environment. I heard this first hand years ago when we were looking to do a server virtualization project and I was skeptical as to how that would be…

In a recent PowerCLI Community thread someone asked how he could create Alarms with the current PowerCLI build. Since there is no PowerCLI cmdlet (yet) to create Alarms I had to fall back on the CreateAlarm method from the SDK. The procedure as described in the vSphere Web Services SDK Programming…

IT Pro VMware today launched its latest virtualisation product, VMware View 4, designed to enable desktop virtualisation in a cost effective and secure way. The product sits on top of its vSphere platform and enables thousands of desktops to run from a single console in the data centre as well as…

I recorded a webcast today on the subject of best practices for re-architecting backup and recovery for virtual environments. If you’re interested, you can view the webcast below, or click here to view the webcast in a separate window.

CNN Money NetApp (NASDAQ: NTAP) today unveiled the new NetApp® SnapManager® for Hyper-V(TM) and SnapManager 6.0 for Microsoft® Exchange Server to improve data backup and recovery in Microsoft Windows Server® 2008 R2 and Microsoft Exchange Server 2010 environments. In addition, NetApp SnapManager…

Now that the VDI-war is still starting big players around the Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) market such as VMware and Citrix are presenting their unique features. Citrix XenDesktop comes up with HDX and VMware View focus is on PCoIP. We all know that display protocols are essential within a…

IT Pro Dell has found a gap in the rack server market and aims to be the first to fill it. Is its latest PowerEdge R510 a good fit? We investigate in this review. Dell’s latest PowerEdge R510 aims to fit neatly into a niche in the server market as it targets small and medium-sized businesses…

A casual Twitter tweet about my power savings through the use of VMware Distributed Power Management (DPM) found its way to VMware Senior Product Manager for DPM, Ulana Legedza, and Andrei Dorofeev. Ulana was interested in learning more about my situation. I explained how VMware DPM had evaluated…

VMware recently announced that the release of VMware View 4 is slated for later this month which will include a new display protocol called PC-over-IP (PCoIP), which should greatly enhance the user experience. What is PCoIP? PCoIP is a relatively new technology developed by a company called Teradici…

I received the following offer in an email this week from VKernel and I thought I would post this information for all VM /ETC readers: ” .. VKernel is now offering FREE perpetual licenses of our Capacity Modeler software until 12/31/09. VKernel Capacity Modeler is an alternative solution to…

VMware have released an official KB regarding the problem that we have all known about for
ummm… how long is it already :) ?

Cannot launch vSphere Client after installing in Windows 7 or Windows 2008 R2

I guess that all the traffic that Joep Piscaer was getting on his blog post on the subject…

VMware Update Manager is the Enterprise tool for Patching your ESX Hosts and for some also the tool used to patch your Windows / Linux Guests as well.

This is all fine and dandy, but what is you do not have all of your ESXi hosts connected to your vCenter?

Why would you so that – you may ask?…

Ever Since Windows 7 has come out we've been seeing a lot of customer interest in running the vSphere Client on it. The same goes for Windows 2008 R2. The trouble is, Microsoft changed the .Net loading mechanism in these...

When designing your VMware vSphere / VI3 environment there are so many variables you need to take into account that it is easy to get lost. Something hardly anyone seem to be taking into account when creating VMFS volumes is that the metadata will also take up a specific amount of disk space. You…

So I recently upgraded my primary work laptop to 64-bit Windows 7. So far, I have no regrets! Loving the new OS, although my battery life seems to have taken a slight hit, but I’m not sure if that’s due to the OS, the battery dying, or a combination of both. However, I did find one [...]

Disclosure: The GestaltIT Tech Field Day is an independent event being held in Sillicon Valley on Thursday 11/12 and Friday 11/13.  The event brings together a unique group of bloggers for sponsored technical presentations, demos, and hands on excercises. Tech Field Day bloggers are free to…

This morning i received this in my Email Posted by Simon Long on The SLOG. Add The SLOG to your RSS Reader. Follow Simon Long on Twitter. Check out his profile on LinkedIn. Simon Long = VTSP 4

I did not even knew it was possible but on the VMTN Community Forums user PatrickD revealed a workaround to set a different block size for your local VMFS. Of course the question remains why you would want to do this and not create a dedicated VMFS for your Service Console and one for your [...]

I’ve installed ActiveBatch in my lab and it Rocks!!! Extensions to ActiveBatch Job Library Let Users Easily Create and Manage Virtual Systems For Running Workflows; Additions Include Support for VMware Job Steps and Events.

ActiveBatch’s new VMware support is made possible through a new set of…

Before starting a Capacity Planner excercise, there is a number of things that should be in place. The following is typically what I send to customers and ask them to have in place beforehand:

If you are looking for a easy and simple guide for setting up iSCSI on vSphere (ESX 4.x) you might want to take a look at this guide from www.techhead.co.uk http://www.techhead.co.uk/vmware-esxi-4-0-vsphere-connecting-to-an-iscsi-storage-target

VMFS – Virtual Machine File Cluster with a possibility to dynamically expand a volume. I found this video on YouTube, where Satyam Vaghani – Senior VMware Engineer – explains which choice customers are having when they short on space on their LUN. Basically the VMFS file system has the…

Tomorrow night I am heading out to Silicon Valley to attend an invitation only Tech Field Day organized by GestaltIT.  Never heard of Tech Field Day?  Understandable, this is the first one!  Organized by GestaltIT’s founder, Stephen Foskett and...

[[More information after the jump - Visit…

I've been getting lots of crap from the commenters on BrianMadden.com accusing me of ignoring Sun's desktop virtualization offerings. And these people have a point. I have been ignoring Sun. I just don't "get" why anyone would use...(read more)<img><img>

Although VMware announced VMware View 4 earlier this week, the latest release of VMware’s VDI platform will not be available for download until November 19. Described as a “marketing announcement” on the pre release call I attended, this weeks news coincides with the availability of new…

Posted by Rick Jackson Chief Marketing Officer VMware has now passed the decade mark, and created what is arguably one of the most important brands in software. In this case, I am simply referring to the name of our company...

Don’t you hate how you feel when you forget someone’s birthday?  It’s really depressing when you forget your own website’s birthday.  My first article was published November 9th, 2008, one year ago yesterday.  I knew it was right around now but finally remembered to check tonight.  I…

I?m back with another rant and this time it is not about Citrix or VMware and/or even Microsoft. In fact, those companies have nothing at all to do with this rant but I need to get this off my chest as it is long overdue. It is all about ?too many clients? and the people that use them. Don?t…

Those individuals with virtualization skills and cloud expertise can earn a much higher salary right now compared to professionals in other areas of IT. Virtualization technology is maturing and spreading throughout datacenters, and the skills needed to implement and operate it are currently in high…

Since understanding what the Isolation Modes will do to your package and the differences between them is essentials to be successful with ThinApp I put together a whiteboard video. I hope you find it useful.

Devices, networking are core considerations desktops and the cloud.

The thing I love about adding my work to my site is that some people pick up what I have created and expand on it, I like to think that’s a sign of firstly my scripts being interesting enough to expand and secondly my scripts being so well written that anyone can pick them up [...]

So what do a school bus, four teenage daughters, an apartment complex, a six-foot sub and a hotel have in common? They can all be used for virtualization analogies! In a previous post I covered the basics on what virtualization is and used an analogy to describe it. I also challenged others to…

Today I ran into this issue with a customer and wanted to write on it so it does not happen to everyone.  Fault Tolerance on vSphere is an awesome solution to maximize uptime.  There is a CPU scenario that may be a challenge however: This KB article (http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1008027) reads: For…

Cycle 6 of the contest (starting 11/30 and ending 12/11) will now focus on the Nexus 1000V product for use with vSphere rather than ESXi.

This week starts the 5th cycle of our vSphere Blog Contest. Over the next two weeks we will be highlighting VMware vShield Zones (http://www.vmware.com/products/vshield-zones/). vShield Zones simplifies application security by enforcing corporate security policies at the application level in a…

Sun Ray Software 5 is a secure, cost effective solution that delivers a rich, virtual Windows, Linux or Solaris OS desktop to Sun Ray thin clients and Sun Desktop Access Client enabled PCs. A major benefit for new and existing customers of Sun Ray Software is the new Sun Desktop Access Client. This…

Today's topic is going to be about VMware's Distributed Power Management or otherwise known as VMware DPM.  If you have not heard about VMware DPM before, I found an interesting video interview with Anne Holler who works at VMware as a Senior Staff Engineer.  I found this interview at Vladan ...

Oracle announced on 13 May 2009 that it has agreed to acquire Virtual Iron Software, Inc. (Virtual Iron), a provider of server virtualization management software. The combination of Virtual Iron technology and Oracle VM’s scalable, high performance and highly available server virtualization…