Up until today I even didn’t know what Microcode or whatit’s purpose was. After today I’ve learned a lot about it and would like to share it with you.

 ”Microcode is a layer of lowest-level instructions involved in the implementation of machine codeinstructions in many computers and other processors” is the description from Wikipedia. I read more an normally the microcode is updated by using a BIOS upgrade or ROM Flash from your vendor (In my case Intel).

Why was I updating this? Because I was updating my Marathon Everrun version from 4.0.2 to 5.0.0 to add Level 3 Fault tolerance. And after the upgrade I couldn’t protect my machines with level 3 protection because of the out of date microcode. So my logical next step was to update my BIOS. After updating my bios through the linux tool provided by HP I rebooted the server and still got the error message. So my Microcode still hadn’t been updated.

After a long and hard search I found out that for Example ESX and some Linux versions update the microcode during the boot sequence by placing a microcode.dat file within the /etc/firmware folder on the root of the server. But of course this folder doesn’t exist on a XenServer (Would have been to easy). So I started looking for a microcode.dat and found it on the server directly in the root of the /etc folder. I renamed the file to microcode.dat.old en placed my microcode .dat (provided by Intel) in the root of the  /ETC folder.

Rebooted the server this did the trick. Good Luck

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

That (and probably the fact that I’m a Dutch guy) is why I was pleased to see the post on the MVUG (Microsoft Virtualization User Group) blog by Patrick Lownds. It states that Microsoft has released a free Hyper-V training. The training is available til 28-12-2009 but I’m not sure until when you can use the free code to register for the training so be quick :).
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Maybe you were already familiar with it but the VMware Communities host a part that’s called VMware Code Central. It’s what supposed to grow to VI/VS administrators heaven I guess. It’s a collection of VI 3 and vSphere 4 sample codes (PowerCli/Perl SDK)  for regular administrator tasks like Backing up VM’s, Making reports, Resource Pool Calculations and so on.

Nava Davuluri of VMware Product Marketing even launced a special blog for it that should update us in an easy to read format on what’s new on VMware CodeCentral. 
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Last week, VMware released a minor update for VMware ThinApp: 4.0.3. Here are the release notes:

What’s New

The 4.0.3 release adds the ObjectTypes parameter to the Package.ini file. You can use this parameter to specify a list of virtual COM objects that are visible to other applications in the physical environment.

The 4.0.3 release changed the name of the VMware ThinApp User’s Manual to ThinApp User’s Guide.

ThinApp 4.0.3 is also a maintenance bug fix release.

Resolved Issues

ThinApp 4.0.3 addresses issues that affect the following applications:

• Telecordia
• Arthemis
• Adobe Reader 9

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A while ago I posted an article about my ESX whitebox and the HP P400 RAID controller I use in this whitebox server. At that time, I used ESXi 3.5 and there was no way I could configure or get the status from the RAID controller. Fortunately, someone commented that it was possible when using the regular ESX (no i) version by installing some HP software packages. I’ve been using ESXi 4 for some time now, but it was quiet annoying when of my disks died and I wasn’t informed about it or could not check the status, other than by restarting the server. I have switched to ESX 4 and now I want to be able to check and configure my P400 RAID controller. And I can! This is how I did it: Read the rest of this entry »

You might already know by now that the session catalog for VMWorld 2009 is online. Some interesting sessions caught my attention. Here are some of them:

Long distance VMotion

We will discuss best practices for setting up VMotion domains over long distances using existing hardware technology and VMware vSphere product. Will cover specific configurations that have been tried and known to work well. Will present use cases that solve practical problems. Will also discuss upcoming technologies that can help overcome limitations in the existing solutions and enable a wider range of applications.

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I already wrote an articly last week concerning the 1st week of general availability of vSphere and refered to Roy Mikes’ article about installing ESX on VMware Workstation but now Xtravirt, known by their usefull PDF’s concerning these issues have released their howto “How to install ESX 4.0 on Workstation 6.5.2 as a VM“. Their PDF, wich is behind closed doors (just register, it’s free), also describes how to configure your ESX VM so that you can run nested VM’s.

I say it’s a must have : http://xtravirt.com/node/177.

Off course I directly update our Usefull Links section with it, if you don’t know it check it out !