SNMP was configured on the ESX servers and VMware vSphere MIBS was imported into the Sysorb tool.

However trying the same for the vCenter server, didn’t give the expected results. I configured some vCenter configuration alarms to test alarms to verify that SNMP trap where sent out. The Alarms and Event tab in vCenter stated that the SNMP trap was sent, however none were received in Sysorb.
I then installed trap receiver from trapreceiver.com and verified through this tool that the alarms where actually sent out and received from the vCenter server.

I wasn’t familiar with how Sysorb was working and had to read up and investigate how it used SNMP to monitor their server and network devices. I found that Sysorb is NOT supporting SNMP traps, but only works through the SNMP GET function. Basically what this means is, that the Sysorb tool was polling the target for status on preconfigured thresholds/triggers in the Sysorb tool.

Since vCenter itself monitors for configured alarms/thresholds/triggers and therefore sending out an SNMP trap if configured, the 2 systems would not work properly together.

I looked in the VMware vSphere documentation for support for SNMP GET and it was stated that support for SNMP GET on vCenter was not available. VMware vCenter only supports SNMP traps for sending out alarms, which also makes perfect sense to me.’

If any has built any workarrounds to get this to work, please let me know.

Output from VMware HCL:

Notice that ESX 4.0 U1 is supported but there are a couple notes. One is to install a specific driver - esx40-net-bnx2x_400.1.48.107-1.0.4. I downloaded and installed the driver on all the ESX servers.

Now I wanted to test the failover. In the HP Virtual Connect Manager I disabled the Shared Uplink Set for Bay 2. I had already setup a continous ping and verified that I still had connectivity to both service console and to VMs running on the hosts, through interconnect bay 1. Test was succesful.

Then I switched arround, enabled Shared Uplink Set 2 and disabled Shared Uplink Set 1 for Bay 1. This time I lost connectivity to both service console and ESX hosts and even I waited a couple minutes, it never came up. I had one other blade server on that enclosure, that was running Microsoft Windows, which I didnt have any problems connecting to.

So I thought the reason was with the ESX configuration.

After I verified all settings on both the ESX hosts ,HP Virtual Connect and the physical switches, which all were identical configured in regards to both interconnect bays, I decided to call HP Support on this issue. I was referenced to a public advisory stating that HP Virtual Connect Flex-10 - ESX 4.0 U1 in an Active/Active Configuration does Not Failover Using SmartLink.

The solution is the following three action points:

1. Verify that the firmware on HP Virtual Connect was running 2.30 as minimum. This setup was running with 2.32 (newest version)
2. Verify that the NIC driver version was Broadcom NetXtreme II Ethernet Network Controller driver 1.52.12.v40.3 (minimum) for ESX/ESXi 4.0. This was different from what the VMware HCL stated.
3. Verify that the NC532i/m bootcode version 5.0.11 (minimum). The bootcode on the NC532 was NOT up-to-date on each blade.

I updated both the NIC driver in ESX and the NIC bootcode with the HP Firmware Maintenance CD and after a reboot, failover was working just as expected. It is recommended by HP to update the bootcode after the NIC driver is installed on the ESX server.

I have NOT been able to find the public advisory article on the HP website on this in regards to VMware vSphere, hence this article.

Im running the newest releases: VMware vSphere 4.0 Update 1 and VMware Lab Manager 4.0.1.

As there is no official fix, the below temporary workaround could be implemented. Bare in mind this is an unsupported temporary workaround.

Go to your vCenter server, first stop your vcenter service and make a backup of the vpxd.cfg file located within C:\Documents and Settings\All Users\Application Data\VMware\VMware VirtualCenter\

Now edit the vpxd.cfg file and add the following:

  <i18nFilter>
    <disable>true</disable>
  </i18nFilter>

Copy/paste the above code in just before the </config> tag.

And start the vCenter service again.

There is a catch-22 by changing this setting. You may observe odd looking tasks in the recent tasks window of VC after this workaround. Hopefully a supported fix is beeing released soon.

Once again, this is not a supported fix and should be changed with care. If you see any problems you should restore the original vpxd.cfg file and restart the vCenter service.

Check some of these blogposts out:
VMware ESX 4 can even virtualize itself by Eric Gray at www.vcritical.com:
http://www.vcritical.com/2009/05/vmware-esx-4-can-even-virtualize-itself/

VMware vSphere in a box by Hany Michael at www.hypervizor.com:
http://www.hypervizor.com/2009/07/vsphere-in-a-box-a-virtual-private-cloud-blueprint/
http://www.hypervizor.com/2009/07/vsphere-in-a-box-part2-putting-the-pieces-all-together/
http://www.hypervizor.com/2009/07/vsphere-in-a-box-part-3-the-lab-manager-40-automation/

The last link above even shows how to utilize VMware Lab Manager to deploy multiple vSphere in a box LABs. That is exactly what I’m trying to achieve in this environment.

So moving forward I ran into problems with the virtualising ESX servers. I could’nt even install ESX or ESXi in the VM. I got the following error ”Kernel panic – not syncing: No supported microcode levels for this stepping of AMD Family….”:

I was quite sure my physical ESX hosts were running a newer processor, that can be used to run a virtual ESX. My setup is like this:
2x HP DL385G5 Servers with AMD Barcelona processors
2x HP DL385G5p Servers with AMD Barcelona processors

I verified the BIOS settings was enabled for AMD-V. I was trying out several of the .vmx tweeks in the past used for VMware Workstation or ESX3.5. Neither of them allowed me to install ESX in the VM.

So I am running different ESX hosts in my cluster and I had enabled EVC on the cluster to allow for VMotion between different CPU models. I tried to disable EVC and bingo, now it worked like a charm.

Installing vSphere 4 Update 1 works without any adjustments in the vmx file. Next step is to see if a VM can be run on top of the virtual ESX server.

The long awaited View 4 is available for download. The earlier version did not support vSphere 4.0 and this new version of View 4 does. It requires VMware vSphere 4.0 Update 1 which also now is available.

So for all that was running View 3.1 in Proof of Concept which required VI 3.5, it would now be possible to upgrade your VMware platform with both vSphere 4.0 Update 1 – which also got released this week.

So there have been quite a few updates from VMware this week:

VMware vSphere 4.0 Update 1 available for both ESX and vCenter
http://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere4/doc/vsp_vc40_u1_rel_notes.html
http://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere4/doc/vsp_esx40_u1_rel_notes.html
http://www.vmware.com/support/vsphere4/doc/vsp_esxi40_u1_rel_notes.html

VMware Data Recovery 1.1 available:
http://www.vmware.com/support/vdr/doc/vdr_110_releasenotes.html

VMware vSphere PowerCLI 4.0 Update 1 available:
http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/windowstoolkit/wintk40u1/windowstoolkit40U1-200911-releasenotes.html

VMware vSphere CLI 4.0 Update 1 available:
http://www.vmware.com/support/developer/vcli/vcli401/vcli_401_relnotes.html

VMware View 4.0 available:
http://www.vmware.com/support/view40/doc/releasenotes_viewmanager40.html

VMware ThinApp 4.0.4 available:
http://www.vmware.com/support/thinapp4/doc/releasenotes_thinapp404.html

I linked to the release notes, because remember that it is important to READ them before using the software.

One award stood out to me, of course, which this blog post is about.

My company was nominated in the category of VMware Partner of the Year in Denmark with 3 other of our competitors.

The happy news was that BusinessMann A/S won the VMware Partner of the Year 2009 award, which makes me really proud.

First of all, thanks to VMware for giving BusinessMann A/S this award and thanks to all my collogues for the hard work in 2009.

Also thanks to Arrow ECS for a great party

It has been a while since VMware announced the partnership with Teradici to use their PCoIP protocol within VMware View for improved user multimedia experience. This is a huge upgrade from the current RDP protocol, which VMware used in prior versions of View

I have watched a few demo’s of Teradici’s PCoIP protocol and has been pretty impressed with those

An overview of the VMware View Architecture:

VMware View4 Architecture

VMware View will be GA on 19th of November 2009 and 60 days evaluation will be available for downloads.

Read more or register for an evaluation on VMware View 4here and you will receive an email when VMware View 4 is ready for download

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 upgraded.

After looking in log files, we saw the following errors:

————Edited/output ————

6 10:19:21 esx1 vmkernel: 0:20:07:45.197 cpu3:6256)Net: 1317: can’t connect device: LAN: Out of resources
6 10:24:03 esx1 vmkernel: 0:20:12:27.267 cpu3:6256)Net: 1317: can’t connect device: LAN: Out of resources
——————————————-

This led us to check for how many ports the vSwitch was configured to use:
esxcfg-vswitch -l

————Edited/output ————

[root@esx1 ~]# esxcfg-vswitch -l

Switch Name   Num Ports    Used Ports   Configured Ports   MTU    Uplinks
vSwitch0          32                32                32                          1500   vmnic0

PortGroup Name   VLAN ID    Used Ports   Uplinks
LAN                       0               29                vmnic0
Service Console    0               1                  vmnic0
——————————————-

As we can see they have a LAN portgroup connected on vSwitch0 together with the Service Console. The default vSwitch is configured with 32 ports and due to the maintenance mode of one ESX hosts, this customer ran into the problem that the vSwitch didn’t have enough available ports for the VMs that were migrated to that specific host.

It resulted in that the NIC in the VM got disconnected and that we couldn’t reconnect it.

Any additionally created vSwitches is per default created with 64 ports.

So this leads me to the point. First, this is a design issue and should never happen if designed accordingly, however I do think that the DRS/VMotion feature should come up with a warning if a vSwitch is full, instead of migrating (VMotion) the VM and disconnect the VMs NIC interface.

This setup would also provide problems in a VMware HA scenario, if no available ports is free, then it would also leads to disconnected NICs in the VMs restarting.

Make sure that if you use vSwitch0 for VM connectivity to raise the number of ports from default of 32 ports to whatever is needed.

Its quite nice and if I had a work with a personal desktop, I would certainly try to get one of these. Instead I did the 2nd best option, because Jason also made a vCalendar Widget. I have now added this widget to my blog, so the dailiy tips, tricks, comments etc is shown on virtualtroll.com.

So now you just need to come back here to virtualtroll to read the daily virtualization quote of the day

Read more about it here

Thanks to Jason for this initiative.

That is quite interesting and very surprising for me. I live about 30 minutes from the conference center

Read his post here

Eric thanks for blogging about this.

On 4th of April, I headed to London to participate in the VCDX Beta Design Exam and a couple of hours ago I received the results. I passed the exam!

Congratulations. You have successfully passed the VMware Design 3 beta exam. A formal score report will be sent to you via Pearson VUE in August. This was the third of five components that you will need to complete in order to achieve the VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX3) Certification. Your participation in the beta exam and continued patience has been greatly appreciated

Next step is now to work on a design application that has to be sent to VMware. If the application get accepted, then I have to defend the design for a board of 2-3 other VMware Certified Design Experts.

For Europe there will be design defenses held in september and I hope that it will not fall in the week of my vacation.

Happy summer holiday!

Back in december I introduced Nicolai Sandager as a new fellow blogger on this site. While he has been blogging some, he has just now finished up his own profile, which you can read here.

I work with Nicolai at a smaller IT Company in Denmark called BusinessMann A/S and have been doing so for over 2 years now. Nicolai has for the last year been working on a rather huge ESXi installation in Denmark initially containing 42 ESX hosts. Over time this installation has grown to 60+ ESXi hosts in two datacenters.

So once again, I’d like to welcome Nicolai and hopefully we will be seeing more blog post on this site in the future.

Remember that VMware will release a separate training course specific to this exam.

The Design Exam Blueprint is available here: http://mylearn.vmware.com/lcms/mL_faq/2256/DesignExamBlueprint.pdf

The following links to documents could be useful in the study for the VCDX Design Exam. It’s only suggestions and not a complete list of study material.

ESX Server 3 Configuration Guide
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_35/esx_3/r35u2/vi3_35_25_u2_3_server_config.pdf

Virtual Machine Backup Guide
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_35/esx_3/r35u2/vi3_35_25_u2_vm_backup.pdf

VMbook - Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/practical_guide_bcdr_vmb.pdf

Setup for Microsoft Cluster Service
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_35/esx_3/r35u2/vi3_35_25_u2_mscs.pdf

VMware HA: Concepts and Best Practices
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/VMwareHA_twp.pdf

SAN System Design and Deployment Guide
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vi3_san_design_deploy.pdf

Good article on SAN based replication:
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0BRZ/is_6_24/ai_n6145654/pg_1?tag=artBody;col1

Disaster Recovery Solutions from VMware
http://www.vmware.com/files/pdf/07Q2_dr_solution.pdf

Making Your Business Disaster Readywith Virtual Infrastructure
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/disaster_recovery.pdf

Using VMware® ESX Server System and VMware Virtual Infrastructure for Backup, Restoration, and Disaster Recovery
http://www.vmware.com/pdf/esx_backup_wp.pdf

If you have access to VAC Partner guides on Partnercentral, the following guides would be useful to read:

VMware Business Continuity Jumpstart
VMware Plan and Design
VMware Virtualization Assessment
VMware Operational Readiness Accelerator Kit

Some ITIL experience or studying would probably be helpful as well

Books:

VMware Infrastructure 3 - Advanced Tactical Design Guide and Advanced Operations Guide, by Ron Oglesby, Scott Herold and Mike Laverick 

http://www.amazon.com/VMware-Infrastructure-Advanced-Technical-Operations/dp/0971151083?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1213399444&sr=8-1

————————————————————————————-

Update 06/03-2009:

VI3.Blueprint Directory: http://viops.vmware.com/home/docs/DOC-1382 

VI3.Blueprint Requirements Specification: http://viops.vmware.com/home/docs/DOC-1384

VIOPS: VI3 Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery Workshop: http://viops.vmware.com/home/message/1989;jsessionid=D7584DF18C1AD92A7416FD814CAF0FE6#1989

————————————————————————————-

If you have any good links to material for the VCDX Design Exam please feel free to email me and I will update the list.

Chris Wolf is an analyst from Burton Group which together with a couple other analysts has spent 3 month in developing the Industry’s First Hypervisor Evaluation Criteria and Vendor Scorecards.

The Burton Group announcement can be read here.

They break up the evaluation criteria’s in three categories, which is:

• Required
• Preferred
• Optional

A short 15 minutes overview of which required features that Burton Group think should be available within the hypervisor product or ecosystem is available here

You have to register to watch it, and I would recommend doing so.

During VMworld a couple of other articles got posted with some comments of Chris’ VMworld presentation, about the results of the evaluation criteria’s and scorecard. These can be found here:

VMware outshines Hyper-V, et al. in hypervisor comparison
Hypervisors Compared: VMware Stands Alone

Now, Chris Wolf has responded to the two articles with a new blog post explaining some of the comments posted and the feedbacks that he got.
Hypervisor Competitive Differences - The Aftermath

I can’t wait to read the full report coming first week in April about the complete evaluation criteria’s and the justification for each. Burton Group will follow this report up by releasing product profiles on Citrix XenServer, Microsoft Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Virtual Iron, and VMware vSphere 4.0

I just want to thank Chris and Burton Group for this work. It will be really nice to have a full objective comparison that is vendor neutral. Of course in each virtualization case you will have to go over the requirements that is needed for the each case.

I used the Flip, that I got from VMware, and filmed the whole session. I had to split it up in multiple sessions because of the 10GB limit of youtube.. But the whole session is there.

Also I presession video with Brian Madden “chitchatting” on different topics. Fun to watch out.

Up front I’m going to warn you. This is amateur video and my arms was pretty tired after this hour of filming

Here they goes:

Brian Madden - Unplugged (Presession)

Brian Madden - VDI vs TS - 1:

Brian Madden - VDI vs TS - 2:

Brian Madden - VDI vs TS - 3:

Brian Madden - VDI vs TS - 4:

Brian Madden - VDI vs TS - 5:

Brian Madden - VDI vs TS - 6:

Brian Madded - VDI vs TS - 7:

Keynote day 1
Paul Maritz, President and CEO of VMware
Dr. Wolfgang Krips, Sr. VP, SAP Managed Services
http://www.vmworld.com/community/conferences/europe2009/agenda/keynotes/1

Keynote day 2
Dr. Stephen Herrod, CTO and Sr. VP of R&D of VMware
“The Future of Virtualization — From the Desktop to the Datacenter”
http://www.vmworld.com/community/conferences/europe2009/agenda/keynotes/2

Here’s a little short video from the VMworld Party:

I think it is an extremely cool thing that the CEO of such a large company actually takes the time to hear “the common man” out, with such an interest as he showed us today. It gives an impression of a man that is very dedicated to the success and reputation of his company. And him actually being a very nice guy also helps tremendously.

Now to catch some zzzzz before the big VMware Party tonight!

The setup was a thin client running a Virtual Desktop on the VMware View broker on the PC over IP protocol from Teradici. The demo was showing Google map scrolling, zooming in an out without any glitching. It ran completely smoothly, Next he demoed a 3D rendering application, zooming in and out on the Eiffel Tower schematics.

Stephen went through some performance numbers telling the world what it already knows, VMware virtual machines rocks performance wise.

Going over some of the numbers that VMware has achieved on virtualizing Exchange and webservers, the overall message of breaking large servers down into more, but smaller, virtual machines will give you a significant better virtualization experience.

Going further on to quickly explaining the concept of vStorage and vNetwork. Opening the storage API for the vendors to be able to use stuff like the thin provisioning of the storage vendor when provisioning virtual machines, instead of the built-in VMware thin provisioning.

Of course going over the vNetwork he went….bla bla bla…Cisco Nexus v1000.

Apparently the notion of going back to a “virtual mainframe” is something that has taken hold of the VMware management. Does it make them feel young again?

Quickly touching down on the new Fault Tolerance feature, Stephen went further on to go over security with VMsafe ending with the new vShield.

VShield Zones is a firewall going in between the VM and its surroundings. You can do different zones having multiple VMs that are firewalled from other VM’s. Should be a nice thing for making DMZ…if we can get the network guys to eat it!

A quick demo of the vCenter Linked mode, showing a environment with 4 linked vCenters and the a new search function.

Going on the the next demo on host profiles, showing how easy it is to add a new host to your environment and getting it in compliance with you standard configuration. Having worked on a large installations of 60 ESXi hosts and the “wonders” that it gives, I just love this function.

Taking up where Paul Mauritz left yesterday we came to the inevitable….vCloud. Finally we got more than talk and slides about the cloud. A vCloud add-on for the vCenter client. This was really cool! The demo showed how to easily connecting to an external cloud for adding more power to your system.

More sweetness came up next when we went to the vClient initiative. We got another demo of what is coming for WAN and LAN support PcoIP using the Terradici protocol. An awsome demo using google earth fluently through VMware View, going over to a CAD like programme showing a full 3D drawing of the Eiffeltower, again fluently work experience. I guess i’ll be going to the Terradici stand having a closer look on that. This demo also gave us a new way of pronouncing the words LAAAAN and WAAAAN.

Thank to my fellow bloggers for a good laugh on that one!

Jerry Chan gave us a quick demo of the coming virtual mobile platform, installing a Windows CE and a Android virtual instance on a Nokia n800. Quite cool but can i actually make a phone call?

All in all a good, and SAP free, keynote!

]]> http://www.virtualtroll.com/?feed=rss2&p=218 http://www.virtualtroll.com/?p=216 http://www.virtualtroll.com/?p=216#comments Tue, 24 Feb 2009 08:38:10 +0000 Heino Skov http://www.virtualtroll.com/?p=216 Paul Maritz talked about some of the virtualization initiatives that VMware is working on. IT should be turned into a service that fundamentally should be easier to manage and monitor.

The three initiatives:

VDC-OS              Infrastructure in the internal cloud

vCloud               Extend the internal cloud to external cloud

vClient               Client side computing and user experience

The cloud/datacenter VDC-OS as architecture contains:

·       Hardware – building blocks

·       Software – which provides availability and scalability

·       Policies – This provides security and compliance to control the cloud.

·       Management – SLA management model - to take management to a higher level.

·       Existing/New Applications – application models for introducing applications within the cloud

All this is called VDC-OS (Virtual Datacenter Center – Operating System). All the new generation products will be called vSphere. All these products will start to ship in 2009.

The cloud is fundamentally to turn all the resources into one giant computer. Apply policies and management on top of it to control, monitor and dynamically extend the services running in the cloud.

VMware quote: Virtualization is the key to making all of the happen in an evolutionary way.

• vSphere is the new name for all their next generation products’
• VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat – high availability for the virtualization management
• VMware vShield Zones – delivers security and compliance to the internal cloud. A new security product suite.

The VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat has really been a long-awaited feature, so we finally can offer high availability for the customers on the vCenter Server it selves. Today 3rd party product or a manual procedure was the options to provide high availability for the vCenter server.

I’ve been enjoying a lunch and a cold beer at a café with my colleague Nicolai.

Tomorrow the conference is starting for VAC Partners, which I will participate in from 9 AM to 20 PM. It’s going to be a long day.

Here’s Nicolai in front of Palais des Festival.

I’m sitting at Eden Hotel and doing my first blog from Cannes and the internet connection is unfortunately not very good.

I’ve got a live blogger invite from Richard Garsthagen, VMware, so I will do live blogging during the week and I hope the internet connection in the conference center is better.

This was my first post from Cannes and hopefully we all have a very exiting week in front of us.

Over and out!

I have never played around with video “podcasting” before, so it should be interesting and I’m certainly going to use it at VMworld.

Thanks to VMware and Richard Garsthagen for this cool gadget

Richard Garsthagen has published a small promo video for us to watch: http://www.run-virtual.com/?p=250

This year all LABs is self-paced giving flexibility to come and go as you like

·       What do you expect will be announced?

·       And what do you really like being announced?

Furthermore, why are you going to VMworld? And have you set yourself some goals on what you want to hear about and what you need to learn more about. It is also a good opportunity to network and get to talk to other virtualization enthusiasts, customers, the VMware crew, bloggers etc.

Primarily, I’m representing my company that I work for and have huge interest in hearing what and how we can build up business in the coming period, based on the new products mostly from VMware, but certainly also from other vendors.

Secondly, I will be live blogging on this site, during the VMworld event and hopefully can participate in delivering the message around virtualization and what’s going to happen the next couple months.

To get back to my two bullets, I do believe it’s hard to tell what the virtualization vendors will announce during the VMworld event. A lot of new products are coming from VMware in 2009 and that will be interesting to hear about. Also Cloud computing is the future for many, but reality for some, and where are we today on this?

I would really like to see VMware announcing the new Virtual Infrastructure 4, or VMware vSphere, which is the new name for the suite of products around ESX and vCenter (formerly VirtualCenter). However I doubt this will happen on VMworld, even several fellow bloggers has argued for that it will happen. We’ll see, I guess.

 Hopefully, I’ll see some of you in Cannes in less than two weeks.

I’m attending VMworld my self and I’m exiting to what VMware will announce this year. Could it be the new version og ESX server and VirtualCenter? (VI4)

If you want to be the first to hear their announcements and what is generally going on in the virtualization business, then participate at VMworld. Register at this site:

http://www.vmworldeurope.com/

By the customers wish we went with ESXi. A decision I now, to some extent, regret.

One of the things that have been the most annoying is the implementation of HA on ESXi. For stable performance of the HA agent, it is nessary to implement some swap space for the agent as described in http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1004177

If you look at the best practices for deploying VMware 3.5, it is not recommended to have your swapspace on SAN, due to the potentiel increased I/O it can generate. In my world this applies to ESXi too…..but would that not ruin the idea of having a server without disks booting from a embedded image?

We have chosen to implement local disks just for swap use. This is, in my opinion, not a very elegant solution. It would have been nice to see the servers delivered with ESXi Embedded with some more space on the chips holding the ESXi, and then swapping on that space.

That solved we ran into more problems with HA. We had some issues with hosts suddently being disconnected in the vCenter interface. All guests kept running, but the management part of the host was inaccessable. This error looked very much like errors i had seen before with logs filling up the / on regular ESX. And correct…it was.

The HA logs are actually located in /var/log/vmware/aam/agent which was not on it’s partition. Therefore this classic error.

The solution is to log into the hidden busybox (press ALT-F1 on the ESXi console and type unsupported), log in with the root password and delete the files using, for example,

find /var/log/vmware/aam/rule -name ‘*.log’ -exec rm {} \;

and restart the management agents using “services.sh restart”

This is a known issue with VMware and will be addressed in Update 4 which we, at the moment, do not have a release date on.

All in all this seriously gives me thought on reinstalling the whole environment to regular ESX 3.5

See you in the new year.

Regards,
Heino

Nicolai is writing up his own profile, which will be available at this site soon.

The reason for this introduction is to hopefully kick some more action on the site, as I’ve been  quite busy the latest period.

So, Nicolai, blog away

Dates: 24-26 February at the The Palais des Festivals, Cannes.

This will be my forth VMworld event and it has always been a huge experience and quite educating. VMworld has different tracks and a big part of these are technical or deep technical, which is cool. There will also be numerous LAB sessions regarding VMware’s product line.

Furthermore a lot of 3rd party vendors and competitors are joining the event, both with sessions or with booths in the solutions exchange. This gives the possibility to talk to their people about their products as either add-on solutions or competitive info.

If you’re a technical minded person, I can only recommend attending the VMworld event.

For registration to the VMworld event click here: http://www.vmworld.com/community/conferences/europe2009/registration/

A preliminary agenda is available here: http://www.vmworld.com/community/conferences/europe2009/agenda

To view the list of sponsors and exhibitors click here: http://www.vmworld.com/community/conferences/europe2009/sponsors

And VMworld is also about networking with each other. This link takes you to the community discussions regarding the VMworld event: http://www.vmworld.com/community/conferences/europe2009/networking

More information will be available here regarding evening activities, such as the VMworld Party: http://www.vmworld.com/community/conferences/europe2009/networking/activities/

For partners, there will be a whole day reserved, read more here: http://www.vmworld.com/community/conferences/europe2009/agenda/partners/

VMware has opened up the “call for participation”, which enables anyone to submit a session. VMware is interested in real world experiences using their products. So, if you have a good case story, and want to tell about it, please submit before January 16th. Call for participation instructions can be found here: http://www.vmworld.com/static/cfp_europe_2009.pdf

To submit sessions use this link: http://www.vmworld.com/europe-cfp.jspa
And stay tuned for more information, of course on my blog and a lot more info will be available at http://www.vmworld.com

See you in Cannes!

The agenda for this meeting is about storage and 2 storage vendors (Netapp and Compellent) are having sessions about their solutions.

The agenda for the meeting is:

Agenda:

10:00 - 10:30 Welcome

10:30 - 12:00 NetApp by Jens Melhede

12:00 - 13:00 Lunch and networking

13:00 - 14:30  VMFS, NFS, iscsi

14:30 - 15:00 Break

15:00 - 16:00 Compellent by Steven Dahlin

So hurry up and signup for the event on this link

I have been in touch with VMware to find out if this is a bug or a new feature. They confirmed there has been a change to VMotion CPU constraints.

Based on my experience, VMware is a little more flexible on CPU constraints than earlier. To sum this up:

If you have two almost identical CPUs, then if you power up VMs on the “oldest” CPUs these VMs would be able to migrate to the new CPU and back. However if you power up your VM on the newer CPU (enabling the new features) then this VM would not be able to VMotion to the older hosts.

However - one thing to keep in mind though.. even though you can avoid the manual work on configuring CPU masking on every VM… DRS and/or VMware HA would over time power on VMs on all hosts - and those powered up - on the new hosts would then have problems doing VMotion.

The solution to this is to use the new feature on EVC (Enhanced VMotion Compatibility). This knowledge base article lists the CPU which is supported for EVC usage: Enhanced VMotion Compatibility (EVC) processor support

We have been working on redesigning the site to provide new features for the community and about one month ago we transitioned to the new site. We already have 500 users on the site - but of course we would welcome more from the Danish community to join us.

One of the important features that we introduced was blogging facilities for our users in addition with forum features. The old site was also missing key features like RSS-feeds, which also now is available.

So to all you Danish IT professionals out there - come and join us at www.it-experts.dk

Download it here:  http://www.solarwinds.com/products/freetools/vm_monitor.aspx

VMotion worked just fine between all hosts as long as the VM was powered on, on one of the three oldest hosts.

But when they powered on a VM on the new host - this VM could not be migrated with VMotion to the other 3 hosts. It came up with the usual Host CPU is incompatible error.

I analyzed the /proc/cpuinfo file in the service console to determine differences between the hosts. The new host was CPU stepping 11 compared to the older which was 6. And the new host had the NX flag enabled. The results on this was:

Then I checked to see if the new Enhanced VMotion Compatibility (EVC) was enabled. But this option was grayed out (disabled) – because the three oldest hosts were not compatible with EVC.

Before Update 2 – and when you had VMotion CPU compatibility issues, VMotions didn’t work either way. So something happened with this in Update 2. In the past you manually had to enter the correct CPU Bits, into each VMs configuration file for VMotion to work.

But in this case I could VMotion all VMs between all hosts forth and back - as long as the VM was started on one of the three older hosts.

I noticed that on the VMs powered on, on the oldest hosts - that CPU masking bits were entered into the vmx file. This was done automatically by the system!

This was added to the vmx file of VMs powered on, on the older hosts.

cpuid.1.eax = “xxxx————xx————–” cpuid.1.ecx = “R—-R–R-RRRR-0———–H-R–” cpuid.1.edx = “—————————T—-” cpuid.80000001.eax.amd = “xxxx————xx————–” cpuid.80000001.ecx.amd = “——————RR-RR-RRR-0—” cpuid.80000001.edx = “—-R—————H———–” cpuid.80000001.edx.amd = “—–R————–H——T—-”   cpuid.1.ecx.amd = “R——-R——————-R—”   hostCPUID.0 = “0000000a756e65476c65746e49656e69″ guestCPUID.0 = “0000000a756e65476c65746e49656e69″ userCPUID.0 = “0000000a756e65476c65746e49656e69″ hostCPUID.1 = “000006f6000208000004e3bdbfebfbff” guestCPUID.1 = “000006f800010800000022110febbbff” userCPUID.1 = “000006f6000208000004e3bdbfebfbff” hostCPUID.80000001 = “00000000000000000000000120000000″ guestCPUID.80000001 = “00000000000000000000000120000000″ userCPUID.80000001 = “00000000000000000000000120000000″ evcCompatibilityMode = “FALSE”

So - I’m just wondering if this is a new feature in Update 2 VI 3.5. It is not described anywhere (at least I have not found any documentation on it).

After some thoughts I summed up - that indeed this is a nice feature to have (If you dont have the possibility to turn on EVC)… Just make sure to power on your VMs on the old servers and it automatically entered the CPU bits needed to do VMotions against the new host. And still a little weird since EVC was disabled. But it removed all the work on manually entering the CPU bits on every VM.

My concern though is that manually editing the CPU bits hasn’t been supported by VMware… so is this supported?

So is this by design or is it a bug (hence that EVC was disabled)?

Live Volume will allow enterprises to manage their disparate storage sites around the world as one virtual data center. As customers move applications from one physical or virtual server to another for maintenance, local site issues or disaster recovery, Live Volume will enable IT managers to proactively and automatically migrate the associated storage volumes. By not requiring investments in third-party tools or mirroring of storage resources, Compellent’s live transfer of data will make it easier and cost-effective to manage all resources regardless of the physical location.

“Compellent is applying the same storage innovation that made automated tiered storage more affordable to next-generation technology like Live Volume and SSD that will not only deliver the highest levels of data performance and availability, but also minimize total cost of ownership,” explained Bruce Kornfeld, vice president of marketing for Compellent. “We are enhancing our automated data movement engine to help ensure enterprises can achieve true business continuity and instant access to their data whether their IT infrastructure is on-premises or delivered by a cloud computing service.”

Automating Business Continuity for Enterprises

Based on Compellent’s unique patented Dynamic Block Architecture, Live Volume is designed to eliminate downtime for enterprises that need to migrate servers and storage for disaster recovery or onsite maintenance. Each data volume will be present and automatically available on Compellent SANs at either site at all times.

“The integration of a feature that could take my storage network from manual disaster recovery to automated business continuity without lifting a finger is a very exciting prospect,” explained Mark Lynch, senior data consultant of Synetrix, based outside London. “As a managed service provider replicating across nine Compellent SANs, our clients’ assets must be protected and online at all times – an outage in our headquarters cannot impact our clients throughout the UK. Live Volume promises to keep all of our data online – whenever, wherever – and ensures downtime is a thing of the past.”

Compellent’s Live Volume seamlessly integrates with the industry’s leading virtual server platforms, enabling servers to share centralized storage resources regardless of the actual location or OS virtualization platform. The new virtual storage technology will complement server virtualization to help further reduce costs and simplify data management.

“The introduction of Live Volume will enable customers to take a step up the ladder from reactive disaster recovery to proactive business continuity in the most cost-effective way,” said Mark Gluckman, managing director of Regal IT, a Compellent channel partner based in Sydney. “We believe Live Volume will eliminate the delays associated with data replication, and provide the ideal architecture for virtualization by migrating virtual machines between sites without any downtime. That’s a valuable commodity to our customers implementing server and storage virtualization in the data center.”

Delivering Performance of SSD for Virtual Data Centers

For enterprises requiring the fastest storage performance for data management, migration and processing, Compellent’s integrated suite of virtualized storage applications will also support solid state drives (SSDs). The Compellent SAN will reserve frequently accessed, active blocks of data for “tier 0” storage for applications like transactional databases that can take advantage of the significant performance gains of SSDs, and dynamically move inactive data blocks to lower storage tiers. Because the Compellent SAN is expected to be the first to automate tiered storage for SSD, customers will be able to accurately plan SSD purchases along with other drive technologies to significantly reduce total costs while maintaining optimal storage utilization and performance.

Availability

Compellent Storage Center with SSD is currently being evaluated by select beta customers. Compellent plans to offer SSD to all markets in Q1 and Live Volume in Q2 of 2009 exclusively through the company’s growing international network of channel partners. Additional product information and pricing details will be announced at launch. More information about Compellent’s Dynamic Block Architecture is available at www.compellent.com/products.

Also this update contains a whole lot of fixes for VMware Update Manager and VMware Converter as well. So make so to upgrade your VI plugins. During the upgrade of VMware Update Manager it will also contain a database upgrade.

Make sure to read the release notes before upgrading: Release notes

To download the VirtualCenter update 3, click here

Remember to do a backup of the SQL database before upgrading. If VirtualCenter run as a virtual environment take a snapshot of it and if possible use VCB (VMware Consolidated Backup) to do an image-level backup as well. That way you can get back to the old one.

Also VirtualCenter needs to be upgraded before VMware Update Manager and Converter.

Well even he had several Linux guys telling him that it was a VMware issue and after some researching and use of google he found several document about this. In fact this problem is not only related to SLES10 but several linux distributions.

VMware has also published a kb article on this, which can be read here

Another useful link from Novell: Click here

I needed over 300 point out of??? (it didn’t say) rumors is 500. My score was 386. Not as high as I would like - but then again - the multiple questions section was pretty hard.

Now off to study for the Design Exam - this will be released next week….

So finally I can get to sleep at the night again

Read the release notes
here:

Read more here:

http://www.compellent.com/News-and-Events/Press-Releases/2008/VMworld_Gold_Award_080919.aspx?ref=HPPR_0919

http://www.vmware.com/technology/virtual-datacenter-os/

Also Scott Love has commented on this. Check it out here:

http://blog.scottlowe.org/2008/09/15/follow-up-on-the-vdc-os-announcement/

All of these very interesting new features and VMworld has yet to start. Unfortunately I’m not on the scene to follow the new stuff that VMware and others will announce the next couple of days. However I will try to keep updates coming in…

However I found this nice article on using VMware ThinApp packages with Citrix XenApp. Its good reading.

What I was first thinking about VMware ThinApp is that I could reinstall my Laptop PC with a clean OS and ThinApp all my applications such as Office, Adobe Reader etc. This way - my laptop would always start alot faster and I would only use resources on the applications whenever I launch the ThinApp’ed package. And no ThinApp agent has to be installed on your machine ever.

I just gotta start pack some applications with ThinApp.

Using VSS along with an image‐level backup of virtual machines (VM) running supported applications allows you to create a transactionally consistent backup image. With such a backup image, you can successfully recover both the VM, and any supported application installed on the VM.

This is very interesting and along time awaited feature. One important thing to notice is that to enable the VSS feature - VMware Tools also needs to be updated and in VMware Tools on each VM you have to enable the VSS support:

1. In the VMware Tools installer, select Modify > Drivers > VSS.
2. Complete the installation process.
3. Restart the virtual machine to make sure VSS components are installed and running.

To read the full whitepaper from Veeam Software click here

Veeam Software has also posted a video testimonial that supports this paper. It’s available at their corporate blog

Remember any time you implement new features to test the implementation thoroughly in a LAB environment if possible.

When the time clock in a server running ESX 3.5 or ESXi 3.5 Update 2 hits 12:00AM on August 12th, 2008, the released code causes the product license to expire.  The problem has also occurred with a recent patch to ESX 3.5 or ESXi 3.5 Update 2.  When an ESX or ESXi 3.5 server thinks its license has expired, the following can happen:

• Virtual machines that are powered off cannot be turned on
• Virtual machines that have been suspended fail to leave suspend mode; and,
• Virtual machines cannot be migrated using VMotion.

The issue was caused by a piece of code that was mistakenly left enabled for the final release of Update 2.  This piece of code was left over from the pre-release versions of Update 2 and was designed to ensure that customers are running on the supported generally available version of Update 2.

In remedying the situation, we’ve already released an express patch for those customers that have installed/upgraded to ESX or ESXi 3.5 Update 2.  Within the next 24 hours, we also expect to issue a full replacement for Update 2, which should be used by customers who want to perform fresh installs of ESX or ESXi. 

I am sure you’re wondering how this could happen.  We failed in two areas:

• Not disabling the code in the final release of Update 2; and
• Not catching it in our quality assurance process. 

We are doing everything in our power to make sure this doesn’t happen again.  VMware prides itself on the quality and reliability of our products, and this incident has prompted a thorough self-examination of how we create and deliver products to our customers.  We have kicked off a comprehensive, in-depth review of our QA and release processes, and will quickly make the needed changes.

I want to apologize for the disruption and difficulty this issue may have caused to our customers and our partners.  Your confidence in VMware is extremely important to us, and we are committed to restoring that confidence fully and quickly.

Thank You,

Paul Maritz
President and CEO
VMware

Error description:

This product has expired. Be sure that your host machine’s date and time are set correctly.
There is a more recent version available at the VMware web site: http://www.vmware.com/info?id=4.

And - Module License Power on failed

1. Power down the virtual machine you are moving.
2. Log in to the source ESX host as root.
3. You must have root login over SSH enabled on the destination. For this procedure, see http://kb.vmware.com/kb/8375637.
4. For each ESX host, be sure you enable outbound SSH communication on the firewall, under Configuration > Security Profile > Properties… and check the box for SSH Client. Using scp -r, copy the virtual machine from the source ESX Server host to the destination ESX Server host.
5. scp -r /vmfs/volumes/<datastore name>/<VM name>/ root@<destination hostname or IP>:/vmfs/volumes/<datastore name>/
6. Open the VI Client and log into the destination ESX Server host.
7. Double-click the datastore icon and browse to the location of the virtual machine.
8. Right-click the .vmx file and choose Add to Inventory.
9. It is now safe to power on the virtual machine.
10. Open VI Client and log into the source ESX host.
11. Right-click the original virtual machine and either delete it, or remove it from the inventory if you want to keep a backup copy.

This product has expired. Be sure that your host machine’s date and time are set correctly.

What does this mean? - It means that every running VM will continue to run. However ESX wont be able to poweron new VMs. If for example a host dies and HA needs to kick in - it would not start the VMs up again.

VMware is working on a patch as we speak and will release it within 36 hours. Alot has already created SR Requests as VMware.

So what should exsisting VMware customers do. Well - try avoid restart any VMs and let the system run as normal.

If you have a VM that needs to be powered on - you have to set the date on the host back… However - be carefull with this - if you have configured time synchronization within VMware Tools.

VMware has released a kb article on this - but unfortunately alot is trying to access it and causes timeouts…

I will post more on this when I get new info.

Update:

Resolution

An issue with ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2 causes the product license to expire on August 12, 2008. VMware engineering has isolated the root cause of this issue and will reissue the various upgrade media including the ESX 3.5 Update 2 ISO, ESXi 3.5 Update 2 ISO, ESX 3.5 Update 2 upgrade tar and zip files by noon, PST on August 13. These will be available from the page: http://www.vmware.com/download/vi. Until then, VMware advises against upgrading to ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 2.

The Update patch bundles will be released separately later in the week.

This KB article will be updated as soon as more information is available, check back frequently for updates and additions.

Update2:

VMware has started to email customers that have downloaded the Update 2 package. The following is FAQ around this update:

FAQ:

1.     What would this express patch do?

More information will be provided in subsequent communication updates.

2.     Will VMware still reissue the upgrade media and patch bundles in the timeframe that has been communicated?

Yes. We still plan to reissue upgrade media by 6pm, August 13 PST (instead of noon, August 13 PST) and all update patch bundles later in the week. We will provide an ETA for the update patch bundles subsequently. NOTE: the “patch bundles” referred to here are for the patches listed above under “Affected Products” and the other bundles released at GA. They are not the same as the express patch which is targeted for 6pm, August 12, 2008 PST as stated above.

3.     Why does VMware plan to reissue the upgrade media before the patch bundles? That is a wrong priority call!

This is not a matter of priority. Since we can get done building and testing the upgrade media before the patch bundles, we want to make that available to customers first instead of reissuing all the binaries later in the week.

4.     Can VMware issue a patch that opens the licensing backdoor in the next hour as a critical measure?

There is no licensing backdoor in our code.

5.     Does this issue affect VC 2.5 Update 2?

No.

Link to WindowsITPro

Link to VMware

Also if you scrolldown on the WindowsITPro link above another VMware products have been selected as runner up in the Virtualization category:

Thinstall’s name changed to VMware ThinApp in the midst of our judging, but everything that makes this a great application virtualization product has remained the same. If you’re looking for an easy, no-fuss way to virtualize applications, you need look no further than ThinApp.

This VMware® VMbook focuses on business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) and is intended to guide the reader through the step-by-step process to set-up a multisite VMware Infrastructure that is capable of supporting BCDR services for designated virtual machines at time of test or during an actual event that necessitated the declaration of a disaster, resulting in the activation of services in a designated BCDR site.

http://www.vmware.com/checklicense/

Just copy and insert the content of your license file and press validate. This will check and correct any errors found and supply you with new content for your license file.

1/ 64-bit’ness
2/ Data Execution Prevention
3/ Hardware Virtualization”

1. Log in to a workstation where the VI Client is installed.
2. Right-click the desktop and select New > Shortcut.
3. In the Create Shortcut Wizard, click Browse and navigate to the location of the VpxClient.exe program and click OK. Note: By default it is located in C:\Program Files\VMware\Infrastructure\Virtual Infrastructure Client\Launcher.
4. After the full path is in the Type the location of the item field append -passthroughAuth -s to the end of the line, where is the hostname or IP Address of the VirtualCenter instance you want to connect to.
5. Click Next.
6. Give a Name for the shortcut.
7. Click Finish.
8. After the shortcut has been created, double-click on the new shortcut, and you are logged into the VirtualCenter Server using the currently logged in credentials.

Note: If the currently logged in user does not have appropriate permissions to VirtualCenter log in fails.

The error message in the event detail describes the incompatibility (for example, “cluster has network X.X.X.X that does not exist on the host”), along with the recommendation to “Consider using Advanced Cluster Settings das.allowNetwork to control network usage.”

So an attempt to reconfigure clusters might fail now if they do not have identical networks.

Read the resolution in this VMware KB article

Another article regarding VMware HA after Update 2

Download VMware ESXi

VMware ESXi Product Info

VMware ESXi Datasheet

VMware ESXi Presentation

VMware ESXi Architecture

VMware ESXi Management

Webinar: VMware ESXi: The Easiest Way to Get Started with Virtualization

VMware ESXi Communities

Now go save some money on power and cooling

• VirtualCenter Awareness
  • Integrates with VirtualCenter to allow for the full benefits of VMware Infrastructure 3.
  • Resource pools managed by Lab Manager can have DRS, VMotion, and HA turned on and Lab Manager virtual machines will be able to take advantage of these capabilities.
  • VirtualCenter will push the Lab Manager agent software onto ESX hosts managed by Lab Manager, eliminating the need to manually install the agent.
  • Easy import of virtual machines from VirtualCenter.

• Enterprise Application Features
  • Ability to create organizations within Lab Manager. Organizations are a method of creating groups of users in Lab Manager with either separate or shared resources (compute, storage) and user objects (configurations, templates, and media).
  • Customizable roles and rights. Lab Manager 3.0 introduces the ability to define custom user roles with varying rights. In this way, an organization can define users with different capabilities and levels of access to resources and objects.
  • Expanded LDAP support. Lab Manager 3.0 supports OpenLDAP for user authentication, in addition to Active Directory. LDAP groups and users are mapped to Lab Manager organizations.
  • More granular sharing. Objects can be shared with specific users, all users in an organization, or across the entire installation.

• Platform Improvements
  • “Gold Master” library configurations. Reference configurations can be labeled as gold masters by users that have the right to do so, distinguishing them from other configurations in the library.
  • Forced deployment modes. User roles can be assigned rights that require or prevent the use of network fencing when deploying Workspace configurations. In addition, you can specify a fencing policy for a configuration or physical network.
  • Directed Deployment. You can deploy virtual machines to specific resource pools. This functionality is helpful for performance testing or situations requiring deployment to hosts with specific hardware, peripherals, or network setups.
  • VMFS Media Store support. A VMFS media store will be set up as the default media store for a new installation.
  • Storage Utility. A storage tool (SSMove) allows you to move virtual machine files between datastores for maintenance purposes.

• Use Case Expansion
  • Multiple NICs, networks, and subnets. Lab Manager 3.0 allows for the definition of multiple physical and virtual networks, each with their own subnet. Virtual machines can have multiple virtual NICs that attach to those networks. In addition, you can set VLAN tags on physical and virtual networks. This greatly expands the number of network topologies that Lab Manager can support.
  • Configuration combining and splitting. In Lab Manager 3.0, you can combine configurations and move virtual machines from one configuration to another.
  • Selective checkout. When you check out a Library configuration, you can select which virtual machines you want to add to a new configuration. In this way, entire test matrices can be stored in a single Library configuration.

Download an evaluation here

If the service console is running a keyboard language other than you’re used to, then it is easy to change. First - if youre using Putty or another SSH program it will use your client’s keyboard language - so the following is only for the server console directly.

• loadkeys us     ‘ changes to US keyboard
• loadkeys dk-latin1      ‘changes to DK-latin1 keyboard

This will work until next reboot. If you want to change it permanently do the following

Go to your ESX console and edit this file /etc/sysconfig/keyboard
KEYBOARDTYPE=”pc”
KEYTABLE=”dk-latin1″

and change only the second line
KEYTABLE=”us”

Now this requires a reboot of the ESX server to work.

Six Reasons Why Microsoft’s Hyper-V Will Overtake VMware to Become the Major Player in the x86 Server Virtualization Marketplace

When I read through this Market Analysis I found some arguments that I wanted to comment on some of these six reasons.

The six reasons is:

1. Price
2. Packaging
3. Depth
4. Reach
5. Control/integration
6. Installed base

Regarding price. Clabby Analytics has layed out a comparison chart on pricing differences between Microsoft and VMware . I havent checked the pricing listed in the charts. What they forget in this picture is that the Consolidation ratio on VMware due to memory sharing would probably be alot higher than on Hyper-V. Thus require more Hyper-V hosts than ESX hosts to run the same amount of virtual machines. So when doing price comparison - I strongly suggest that you do this on a per virtual machine basis.

On packaging they argue that Hyper-V is an addon to any 64bit version of Windows Server 2008 operating system - this is a valid argument. They also state that installing Hyper-V is a breeze. Rigth, but first you need to install Windows Server 2008. How long does that take? VMware is delivering ESX 3i for free - and the major server vendors is adding this builtin to the physical servers and it takes seconds to enable the software and boot the server with ESX. No installation of an operating system is required. Its basically Plug´n´play.

On product depth, VMware is in the lead and will be for a while. Microsoft will over the next years come in closer but I agree on the management side Microsoft has a strong competition parameter. Many large organisation does already have some or all of the System Center products installed and licensed and this will be a clear advantage from Microsoft. VMware’s advantage in this section is that VirtualCenter is user-friendly and easy to use for the administrators, whereas the Microsoft System Center application suite is pretty complex to setup and maintain.

In the control/integration sections  clabby analytics claims that VMware is a Windows add-on? HUH? Is this article on VMware Server? or is it on VI3 products? ESX doesnt require a Microsoft OS to be installed prior to installing ESX. VirtualCenter run’s on top of an Microsoft operating system and thats whats basically is required to run a VMware Virtual Infrastructure environment today.

The article states some shortcomings of Hyper-V - which mostly refers to live migration (VMotion). But what other features does VMware ESX provide that uses VMotion. VMotion is the key enabler of alot of features from VMware:

1. Storage VMotion - moving LIVE guest VMs between different LUNs. This does make it alot easier to redesign the storage when scaling out or migrating to a new storage array.
2. VMware Update Manager - patching of ESX hosts without any downtime for the guest VMs? This cannot be done with Hyper-V yet.
3. DRS - automatically load balance between ESX servers in a VMware DRS Cluster.
4. DPM - automatically shutdown ESX servers hosts to save on power in periods of low usage.

Microsoft Hyper-V doesnt provide any of the above features without downtime for the guest VMs.

Furthermore VMware has as other key features as mentioned earlier Memory sharing, Memory overcommitment and Memory balloning - all techniques to save on memory usage within an ESX server host. This enables ESX to have alot higher consolidation ratio than Hyper-V. Hyper-V would in most circumstaces need more hosts to run the same amount of guest VMs that ESX. So Hyper-V would also be more expensive in cooling and power costs….

Finally I would like to mention an interesting product from VMware - called VMware Site Recovery Manager - providing features for disaster recovery between physical datacenters with the feature of testing a failover periodically.

Update: I just found an answer from VMware regarding the above market analysis, which can be read here

So what new commands has been added? Here’s a list:

• esxcfg-dns - Specifies an ESX Server host’s DNS configuration.
• esxcfg-module - Enables VMkernel options
• esxcfg-user - Creates, modifies, deletes, and lists local direct access users and groups of users
• vicfg-dns - Specifies an ESX Server host’s DNS configuration.
• vicfg-module - Enables VMkernel options
• vicfg-user - Creates, modifies, deletes, and lists local direct access users and groups of users
• vmware-cmd - Manages the virtual machines in your VMware Infrastructure environment

The vi- commands is for use with 3i and the esx- command is for use with 3.5 (and the service console)

For a complete new guide for VMware Remote CLI - check this out.

Also the new RCLI supports the use of SSPI for authentication. This feature allow us to use passthrough authentication when executing scripts.  For this too work - VirtualCenter needs to be updated with the Update 2 package.

Note: Not all combinations of VirtualCenter and ESX Server versions are supported and not all of these highlighted features are available unless you are using VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 2 with ESX Server 3.5 Update 2. See the document ESX Server, VirtualCenter, and VMware Infrastructure Client Compatibility Matrixes for more information on compatibility.

Features

• Windows Server 2008 support – Windows Server 2008 (Standard, Enterprise, and Datacenter editions) is supported as a guest operating system. With VMware’s memory overcommit technology and the reliability of ESX, virtual machine density can be maximized with this new guest operating system to achieve the highest degree of ROI. Guest operating system customizations and Microsoft Cluster Server (MSCS) are not supported with Windows Server 2008.
• Enhanced VMotion Compatibility – Enhanced VMotion compatibility (EVC) simplifies VMotion compatibility issues across CPU generations by automatically configuring server CPUs with Intel FlexMigration or AMD-V Extended Migration technologies to be compatible with older servers. Once EVC is enabled for a cluster in the VirtualCenter inventory, all hosts in that cluster are configured to ensure CPU compatibility for VMotion. VirtualCenter will not permit the addition of hosts which cannot be automatically configured to be compatible with those already in the EVC cluster.
• Storage VMotion – Storage VMotion from a FC/iSCSI datastore to another FC/iSCSI datastore is supported. This support is extended on ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 1 as well.
• VSS quiescing support – When creating quiesced snapshot of Windows Server 2003 guests, both filesystem and application quiescing are supported. With Windows Server 2008 guests, only filesystem quiescing is supported. For more information, see the Virtual Machine Backup Guide and the VMware Consolidated Backup 1.5 Release Notes.
• Hot Virtual Extend Support – The ability to extend a virtual disk while virtual machines are running is provided. Hot extend is supported for vmfs flat virtual disks without snapshots opened in persistent mode.
• 192 vCPUs per host – VMware now supports increasing the maximum number of vCPUs per host 192 given that the maximum number of Virtual Machines per host is 170 and that no more than 3 virtual floppy devices or virtual CDROM devices are configured on the host at any given time. This support is extended on ESX 3.5 Update 1 as well.

Hardware Enablement and Management:

• 8Gb Fiber Channel HBAs – Support is available for 8Gb fiber channel HBAs. See the I/O Compatibility Guide for ESX Server 3.5 and ESX Server 3i for details.
  SAS arrays – more configurations are supported. See the Storage/SAN Compatibility Guide for ESX Server 3.5 and ESX Server 3i for details.
• 10 GbE iSCSI initiator – iSCSI over a 10GbE interface is supported. This support is extended on ESX Server 3.5 Update 1, ESX Server version 3.5 Update 1 Embedded and ESX Server version 3.5 Update 1 Installable as well.
• 10 GbE NFS support – NFS over a 10GbE interface is supported.
• IBM System x3950 M2 – x3950 M2 in a 4-chassis configuration is supported, complete with hardware management capabilities through multi-node Intelligent Platform Management Interface (IPMI) driver and provider. Systems with up to 32 cores are fully supported. Systems with more than 32 cores are supported experimentally.
• IPMI OEM extension support – Execution of IPMI OEM extension commands is supported.
• System health monitoring through CIM providers - More Common Information Model (CIM) providers are added for enhanced hardware monitoring, including storage management providers provided by QLogic and Emulex. LSI MegaRAID providers are also included and are supported experimentally.
• CIM SMASH/Server Management API – The VMware CIM SMASH/Server Management API provides an interface for developers building CIM-compliant applications to monitor and manage the health of systems. CIM SMASH is now a fully supported interface on ESX Server 3.5 and VMware ESX Server 3i.
• Display of system health information – More system health information is displayed in VI Client for both ESX Server 3.5 and VMware ESX Server 3i.
• Remote CLI – Remote Command Line Interface (CLI) is now supported on ESX Server 3.5 as well as ESX Server 3i. See the Remote Command-Line Interface Installation and Reference Guide for more information.

Management Agents Support

• HP Management Agents – HP Insight Management Agents provide server management capabilities for ESX Server hosts installed on supported server platforms. A new version, 8.1, is now supported.

Guest Operating System Support

• Solaris10 U5 - Both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions are supported.
• SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 10 SP2 - Both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions are supported. The 32-bit version supports the VMware Virtual Machine Interface (VMI) and is hence performance-optimized for VMware environments.
• Ubuntu 8.04 - Both the 32-bit and 64-bit versions are supported. The 32-bit version supports the VMware Virtual Machine Interface (VMI) and is hence performance-optimized for VMware environments.

Service Console , driver and library updates

• Service Console Operating System Update - The ESX Server Console operating system has been updated to RHEL 3.0 U9. See the document Updated RPMs and Security Fixes for detailed information.
• Driver updates - The tg3 driver has been updated to version 3.81c. The megaraid_sas driver has been updated to version 00.00.03.19.
• Library update - StoreLib has been updated to version 2.51.

VMware High Availability (HA)

VirtualCenter 2.5 update 2 adds full support for monitoring individual virtual machine failures based on VMware tools heartbeats. This release also extends support for clusters containing mixed combinations of ESX and ESXi hosts, and minimizes previous configuration dependencies on DNS.

VirtualCenter Alarms

VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 2 extends support for alarms on the overall health of the server by considering the health of each of the individual system components such as memory and power supplies. Alarms can now be configured to trigger when host health degrades.

Guided Consolidation Enhancements

Guided Consolidation now provides administrators with the ability to filter the list of discovered systems by computer name, IP address, domain name or analyzing status. Administrators can also choose to explicitly add physical hosts for analysis, without waiting for systems to be auto-discovered by the Consolidation wizard. Systems can be manually added for analysis by specifying either a hostname or IP address. Multiple hostnames or IP addresses, separated by comma or semi-colon delimiters, may also be specified for analysis. Systems can also be manually added for analysis by specifying an IP address range or by importing a file containing a list of hostnames or IP addresses that need to be analyzed for consolidation. Guided Consolidation also allows administrators to override the provided recommendations and manually invoke the conversion wizard.

Live Cloning of Virtual Machines

VirtualCenter 2.5 Update 2 provides the ability of creating a clone of a powered-on virtual machine without any downtime to the running virtual machine. Therefore, administrators are no longer required to power off a virtual machine in order to create a clone of it.

Windows Single Sign-on Support

You can now automatically authenticate to VirtualCenter using your current Windows domain login credentials on the local workstation, as long as the credentials are valid on the VirtualCenter server. This capability also supports logging in to Windows using Certificates and Smartcards. It can be used with the VI Client or the VI Remote CLI to ensure that scripts written using the VI Toolkits can take advantage of the Windows credentials of your current session to automatically connect to VirtualCenter.

Plug-in Updates

This release of the VMware Infrastructure 3 software suite also includes:

• An update to VMware Converter Enterprise.For more information, see the VMware Converter Enterprise Update 2 for VirtualCenter 2.5 Release Notes.
• An update to VMware Update Manager. For more information, see the VMware Update Manager 1.0 Update 2 for VirtualCenter 2.5 Release Notes.

Download ESX Server 3.5 Update 2 here here

Download ESX Server 3i Installable Update 2 here here

Download VirtualCenter Update 2 here

Remember to also update VMware Consolidated Backup to version 1.5 which can be downloaded here here

I personally knew about the License Administrator - but didnt knew about the Support administrator. The license administrator is often the person on which the licenses is ordered to…. this means to open a support case - you previously had to use that persons login account on the VMware website.

This kb article describes how to add Support Administrators to the contract.

There are four core validation components to achieve VCDX.

1. Must be certified as a VMware Certified Professional (VCP) on VMware Infrastructure 3.
2. Pass the VMware Enterprise Administration Exam. Includes live labs and tests a higher level of skill set than the exam for VCP on VMware Infrastructure 3.
3. Pass the VMware Design Exam. This exam focuses on actual design scenarios and contains simulations and situational questions.
4. Submit, present and defend a successful VMware Infrastructure design and implementation plan.

I passed my first VCP in 2.5 several years ago and took the VCP 3 certification at VMworld in 2006. So its definately time to get to the next level of certification from VMware. I signed up for this exam in May and got an invite today for the second step. I’m scheduled to take the VMware Enterprise Exam in Munchen 4th of september.

Another collegue of mine is also scheduled for this test on the same date.. Exiting

This requires two ESX server hosts and some kind of storage. Storage is not easy to come around for test environments, so I used a couple free tools for this. Xtravirt Virtual SAN and Openfiler.

One of the test LABs is created by using two older Dell 2900 servers which is sponsored by one of our customers. The servers had 2 Processors, 4 GB RAM and 216GB of diskspace on 4 discs. Now to the fun part. Using Xtravirts Virtual SAN (XVS) I was able to enable some of the local storage on each server and setup replication between the XVS appliance boxes and present the storage back as ISCSI storage to both ESX hosts. This way I can provision VM guest using the datastores from the ISCSI based “local” storage and still do VMotion of VM guests between ESX boxes. Pretty cool as an ESX test LAB.

The other test LAB was actually created on my laptop with VMware Workstation 6.5 beta 2, which now supports ESX servers 3.5 and running VM guests within them. This was a problem in prior version of VMware Workstation with ESX 3.5. I created another VM guest in VMware Workstation and installed Openfiler on this one and used this to present ISCSI based storage to the two ESX server hosts. All running fine in my LAPTOP.

Performance is not all that good - but its perfect as a test LAB for ESX.

Before enabling VMotion create the neccesary virtual switches and vmkernel interfaces using esxcfg-vswitch and esxcfg-vmknic commands

Examples:

To create a new vswitch called vSwitch10 do:

• esxcfg-vswitch -a vSwitch10

To link a vmnic to vSwitch10 do:

• esxcfg-vswitch -L vmnic1 vSwitch10

To create a portgroup called VMotion on vSwitch10 do:

• esxcfg-vswitch -A VMotion vSwitch10

To create the vmkernel interface on the VMotion portgroup do:

• esxcfg-vmknic -a -i 10.0.0.1 -n 255.255.255.0 VMotion

To enable that interface as the VMotion interface. First thing we need to know is the interface name of the vmkernel port. To find that do:

• esxcfg-vmknic -l

This lists all the vmkernel interfaces that is created on the ESX host. Its likely that its called vmk0 because its probably the first vmkernel interface created

Now Enable the vmkernel interface to used by VMotion do this:

• vimsh -n -e “/hostsvc/vmotion/vnic_set vmk0″

All done. Now verify in the VirtualCenter client that your vmkernel interface now is enabled for VMotion.

Note: The vimsh command does only work in ESX 3.5 and not 3i unfortunately as 3i doenst have a service console. To use esxcfg- commands with 3i install the VMware Infrastructure RCLI Tool created by VMware.

During the Q2 2008 earnings call the company announced that before the end of July it will release the Update 2 for VMware Infrastructure 3.5 and that will give away the lightweight edition of the product, ESX 3i, for free.

The new 3i edition was introduced at the end of the last year.
It doesn’t change the characteristics of the hypervisor but fundamentally chances a part of its architecture, dropping the Console Operating System (COS) and reducing the overall system footprint to 32Mb.
The change allowed several OEMs to preload this edition of the hypervisor into their servers, through internal USB keys, Solid-State Drives (SSD) or hidden partition in the primary hard drives.

virtualization.info has learned some additional details about the move:

• VI 3.5 and ESX 3i will continue to share a the large majority of the code base (so there will be an ESX 3i Update 2). There will be no delays on the release of both products.
• ESX 3i will continue to have the same features that has today, without additional limitations
• ESX 3i will continue to have the same APIs, allowing anybody to develop free or commercial alternatives to VirtualCenter (despite some features like VMotion cannot be replicated because of the VMware SDK limitations).
• VMware will not require the purchase of any software & support subscription to access the product. Customer will be able to get the code without any restriction.
• The customers that purchased the current version of ESX 3i directly from the VMware online store will be eligible for a rebate.
• The ESX version that includes the Console Operating System (COS) will not be faded out (at least in the short timeframe). Most VMware customers are currently using that version and the company will support them for a long time.
• VMware Server will not be faded out (as many could suppose). The company still sees the product as a valuable proposition for a different kind of audience.

Read more here. at virtualization.info.

Compellent has more than 1500 installations worldwide and Comic Relief is one of them. Read this businesscase on Comic Reliefs implementation on Compellent and VMware.

Comic Relief, has implemented a Compellent storage area network (SAN) and VMware platform to create a virtual storage and server environment. As a result of deploying Compellent technologies such as thin provisioning, automated tiered storage and continuous snapshots, the charity has dramatically improved its IT asset utilisation. It has also cut the number of physical servers required by one fifth, while reducing the costs of powering, cooling and housing their servers – helping Comic Relief meet its environmental IT commitments.

Previously, Comic Relief’s backup data was held off-site on tapes and could take several hours to recover. Today, however, recovery has been reduced to minutes and just a few mouse clicks, using Compellent’s Data Instant Replay snapshots. In addition, the charity has deployed Compellent’s Automated Tiered Storage, called Data Progression, to automatically move less-frequently accessed data to lower-cost disks.

Comic Relief has also increased asset utilisation by deploying Compellent’s thin provisioning technology, called Dynamic Capacity, to eliminate allocated but unused capacity across the network.

The charity only uses physical disk space when data is written. This has provided a fast, affordable and environmentally sensitive way to scale its storage requirements in line with future data growth –enabling the charity to create virtual volumes of any size up front, and add new storage capacity as needed without having to shut down data access.

John Thompson, Comic Relief’s Head of IT, comments: “Compellent’s SAN has been instrumental in reducing our IT capital and operational costs. It also ensures that our systems are better protected from potential downtime and data loss. Compellent has provided us with an extremely cost-effective solution, ensuring that the maximum amount of profit is donated to our global initiatives. We herefore regard Compellent as an absolutely crucial partner in enabling us to adapt to rapid business growth and change – ensuring our long-term survival and continued success.”

Andy Hardy, Compellent Managing Director of International Sales, concludes: “Organisations like Comic Relief are building flexible virtual data centres founded on Compellent storage virtualisation technologies and VMware server virtualisation solutions. Compellent, together with VMware has enabled Comic Relief to move towards an environmentally friendly storage and server infrastructure.

Unlike in traditional SAN environments, the charity does not need to spend money on powering and cooling unused storage space.”

The installation was carried out by Fordway Solutions, a Compellent partner, and one of the UK’s leading enterprise management, data storage, IP networking and IT infrastructure specialists.

About Compellent

Compellent is a leading provider of enterprise-class network storage solutions that are highly scaleable, feature-rich and designed to be easy to use and cost effective. For more information, please visit: http://www.compellent.com

This was supposed to be fixed in Update 1 to VC 2.5. Unfortunately in some installations this error still occur and has been reported to VMware support. VMware has released this kb article on the issue with a workaround until a permanent fix is released.

“An error occurred during configuration of the HA agent of the host”

This issue is seen in diskless ESX 3i installations.

To adress this issue read the following article 

Issues when restarting the mgmt-vmware service within the service console has resulted in VMs also has been restarted in certain versions of ESX and patches has been released.

This knowledge base article adresses exactly this problem.

Recommendation: Verify that the patches listed in the article are installed or before doing a “service mgmt-vmware restart” within the service console - verify and turn off the feature of Virtual Machine startup/shutdown. See the above article for guidelines.

Before upgrading VirtualCenter to 2.5 - VMware recommends to apply the latest patches for ESX servers running 3.0.1 or 3.0.2 to avoid getting in the above scenario.

This article describes the issue and solutions further.

VMimages not showing up when mounting ISO to CD/DVD in VC 2.5

If the initial installation of VirtualCenter is done by downloading the ZIP file and you use the ISO image to upgrade to 2.5 update 1, the upgrade process would likely fail with an error code “Please insert disk 1″.

Unfortunately I had to cancel the upgrade which resulted in a corrupted database with several VMs with the same names. Before the upgrade I made a full database backup on the SQL server and use the VMware snapshot feature on the VirtualCenter Virtual Machine, so the error was quickly recovered by reverting my snapshot and restoring the VirtualCenter databases from my backup.

When I then upgraded from the ZIP file - the whole upgrade process worked like a charm.

This error actually goes back to prior versions as well and VMware has a knowledge base article on this but its only related to upgrading VC from 2.0.1 to 2.0.2. Read more here

Download the file that is linked to in the above knowledge base article to prepare VirtualCenter for using ISO image upgrade.

Another recommendations before upgrading VirtualCenter…. backup of the VirtualCenter server (which is an easy process if its virtualized) and both VC databases as well.

Supposedly Paul has more experience in how to lead and run a company of VMware’s size. It will be exciting to see how this change will influence the coming month of battles with Citrix and Microsoft.

Paul is a former Microsoft executive…

Read the announcement here

1. Hyper-V is marketed as free but really isn’t.

Yeah it’s $28 bucks but that’s on top of a Windows 2008 License paid in full. This is nowehere near the realm of free, in fact if you take a straight Windows 2008 Standard Licence which is $999 and add Hyper-V you have a $1027 hypervisor that doesn’t event have management ability.

ESXi starts at $495 and comes bundled with most major hardware vendors soon (which can be perceived as free similar to hyper-v if apples are to apples). ESXi also has far more functionality and stability over Hyper-V.

Perceived pricing is all fine and good but when it’s time to actually fork over the cash, the reality can (and will) be painful. There is no way to obtain Hyper-V without paying MS for full Licenses of Windows 2008. Even if you have a software deal, you still paid, and don’t kid yourself that you didn’t.

2. Hyper-V is not actually bare metal.

What we have here is a competitor to VMware server with Hardware assist and Enlightened devices. Hyper-v looks good on paper but is nothing more than a hosted hypervisor with paravirtualization support with dated features.

3. MS target market is low margin with little to gain because SMBs aren’t ready.

Going for the entry level market is fine strategy that has worked in the past but Virtualization does not follow standard paths. There are reasons why SMBs don’t use Virtualization as much, if they really intended to do server consolidation en masse they would have done so with the plethora of free software already out there.

The truth is that SMBs do not want to put their eggs in one basket. Placing 10-15 servers on one physical box is not ideal for them. In this situation a single outage is massive and may bring down the entire company. Hyper-V only increases this risk further. There are no killer features in Microsoft’s roadmap right now that can address high availabilty at the costs necessary to achieve SMB adoption. Free is not going to work here otherwise VMware server would be absolutely everywhere already.

The SMB market is slowly coming around but just any old Hypervisor is not going to break them free. What is really needed is an affordable solution that can bring functionality like VMotion and High Availability at a price that is highly affordable.

4. Hyper-V ties the hypervisor back to the OS.

I don’t see a server that is running Windows 2008 being vunerable to viruses, patches and so on being a palettable platform to house 10 or more machines. Need a security update? Time to reboot…yeah that’s not going over well. Virus took down a windows component? Now you have a massive outage.

The OS being part of the hypervisor is a big mistake. It has to be transparent, the user can’t know it exists at all, VMware is right that it should be in the hardware completely protected from the elements. A hypervisor is supposed to be running virtual machines, not Virus Scanners and other 3rd party junk screwing up the OS.

MS will have to release a true bare metal product to compete with VMware and they need to do it soon. I highly doubt they will though as Windows is integral to Hyper-V’s ability to do half of the things ESX does.

5. Virtual Machine Density is a fraction of what is possible

Overcommit is underestimated by Microsoft. If you give 4GB RAM to a Virtual Machine, does it really actually always need that 4GB? No! If it uses 2GB 90% of the time, why not use that 2GB?

ESX has at least double the capacity for VMs over Hyper-V in the overwhelming majority of situations. And yes, it performs admirably in reality. Higher VM density = major cost savings.

Microsoft has a long way to go. They have a 1.0 product, good for them. But this product is going to have an uphill battle for a long time in a new market. Virtualization is a different animal than SQL server and Netscape. Price is not the only factor, especially when just implementing Virtual Machines gives immediate ROI regardless of the solution chosen.

I for one will choose 99.999% uptime and spend 2x the money to get it over a solution that can’t offer anything close when I’m already going to save hundreds of thousands of dollars a year on top of licensing fees to implement it (or millions).

Food for thought.

Interesting reading…

Site Recovery Manager comes with one important feature that Powershell cant help with. That is to test the failover from one site to another - without touching your production environment.

Read Mike’s first draft for this guide here. This chapter is part of a new book Mike is writing on Site Recovery Manager.

Then take a look at this whitepaper, written by By Mike Laverick from © RTFM Education:

Thanks Mike

One of the core missions for the Defense Information Systems Agency (DISA) Field Security Operations (FSO) is to secure Department of Defense (DoD) Computing systems.

Read it here

I highly recommend to read this whitepaper.
 

Read it here

This document is intended for network architects, network engineers, and server administrators interested in understanding and deploying VMware ESX Server 3.x hosts in a Cisco data center environment.

Read it here

It’s pretty good. Enjoy it!

1. Omdøb filen vmware-vmx-debug.exe til vmware-vmx-debug_old.exe
2. Omdøb filen vmware-vmx.exe til vmware-vmx-debug.exe

Genstart derefter din maskine og voila

Hvis du vil “lege” med VMware Workstation beta2 klik her:

http://www.vmware.com/communities/content/beta/ws65/registration.html

Read more here.

Microsoft does not support two Hyper-V hosts accessing the same LUN at the same time. You have to setup Cluster Disks that only one host can access. This means that when you want to do a failover with Quick Migration – you failover the whole LUN. All guests (VMs) that use that specific LUN will be suspended in a short period and then moved to another host. It happens within seconds – but the VM is not accessible in that period and users may lose connectivity.

To be able to move a single guest from one Hyper-V host to another host requires that this guest use its own dedicated LUN. This could potentially limit the number of VMs running on a Hyper-V host. For database servers, like SQL, Exchange, where you split the load on more than one LUN to separate random IO from sequential IO, this will dramatically limit the number of guests on one specific host or cluster. One host or cluster can only address up to 255 LUNs. 16 nodes are supported in a MS Cluster.

If you decide to put more guests on the same LUN – this group of guests will all be failed over to the same destination host. In the end this means that you would need more hosts to support the same amount of guests compared to VMware, because you need available resources within the other hosts to be able to take over the load from all guests within a same LUN. One thing to consider is how long a failover takes. This should be tested thoroughly. In prior versions of MS clustering the more resources in the resource group that you want to failover the longer it took.

Also you would not be able to separate the load from one Hyper-V host (that has failed) to multiple hosts. It all depends on design – but it makes it more complicated in my opinion.

I think the way VMware does this is far more flexible and scales a lot better and potentially it is possible to use more resources on each hosts and still have capacity to lose a single or two hosts within a cluster. VMware can failover multiple guests to multiple hosts – sharing the same LUN and by that spreading the load from the failed host on multiple hosts.

Many customers are not very confident with running a Microsoft Cluster solution based on the reputation the cluster features has on stability, management and complexity. I have prior build and setup multiple MS cluster solutions and they have became a lot more stabile in Windows Server 2003 and hopefully even more with Server Windows Server 2008.

Final note is that Quick Migration can’t be compared with VMware’s VMotion. Quick Migration suspends the guest or guests before they are failed over with a minimal downtime. VMware VMotion moves the VM guest within hosts without downtime. Several other features from VMware is built on top of VMotion – which is VMware Update Manager, VMware Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS – automatic load balancing on CPU and memory), VMware Storage VMotion, VMware Distributed Power Management (DPM – currently in experimental support only)

For more info on Microsoft Quick Migration read this whitepaper: http://download.microsoft.com/download/3/B/5/3B51A025-7522-4686-AA16-8AE2E536034D/Quick%20Migration%20with%20Hyper-V.doc

For more information on VMware VMotion read this datasheet: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vmotion_datasheet.pdf

• Dell Virtualization (what Dell does around virtualization)
• Perl og Powershell (about scripting and how it could be used and demo)
• RCLI og ESXi (also scripting with the remote command line interface and demo)
• LCM (Lifecycle Manager - overview and demo)
• SRM (Site Recovery Manager - overview and demo)
• Geek surprise (A geek award (who has the coolest home test lab) and two VMUG beers)

Who else does that? Thanks to Steen Spur for the home brewed beers - cool initiative

More info from the meeting will be posted on http://www.vmug.dk/

Read this article from Randall C. Kennedy: Hyper-V’s Achilles’ heel

The article talks about Microsoft key advantages to VMware that it supports generic Windows drivers but it “could” also be the weakest point on Hyper-V.

If you need to update drivers in the parent partition you should consider shutting down your running VMs first. Hopefully Microsoft will work on solving this before release.

Read the article here.

Compellent offers several other features like Thin Provisioning, Thin Replication (remote, dedup), Continious Snapshots, Advanced Virtualization, FastTrack and Boot from SAN (one image). Read more on www.compellent.com

Take a look on this 5 minute demo on
Compellent FastTrack and other features

Read more on Automated Tiered Storage (ILM) see this article:
Compellent Review on Automated Tiered Storage

Also Storage Magazine Quality Awards - Compellent came out on top. Read more here:
Storage Magazine Quality Awards

Some quotes on Compellent:

“The Compellent Storage Center is the best SAN we’ve tested, with the broadest feature set and the greatest ease of use.”
“Compellent’s level of maturity, both in feature set and ease of use, places it alone at the pinnacle of midrange systems and even compares favorably with top-tier systems.”
“Superb scalability and excellent support, all at a very competitive price.”
InfoWorld, January 2008

http://h18006.www1.hp.com/storage/highlights/06162008.html#va

This is an exiting product that customers can use to build a Disaster Recovery environment and at the end have the a possibility to test the whole failover whenever the customer feels it neccesary.

VMware Site Recovery Manager is dependent on SAN based replication and on release the following SAN vendors was supported: Dell EqualLogic, EMC, FalconStor, LeftHand Networks and NetApp. More SAN vendors has stated they will be supported shortly after release.

To get more info on VMware Site Recovery Manager please see this link:

http://www.vmware.com/products/srm/overview.html