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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 And after the upgrade I couldn’t protect my machines with level 3 protection because of the out of date microcode.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
Reduce MS licensing costs by 95% !!! in a virtualized environment.
This sounds impossible but when I read Gabe’s article correctly he brings back Microsoft OS licensing costs of about $800.000 (for 200 physical hosts) back to just $40.000 (for 200 virtual hosts). Of course this presents an ideal situation.
The situation Gabe describes:
- 200 physical hosts -> 200 virtual guests on 7 physical hosts
- virtualization solution can be any: MS, Citrix, VMware or other
Read the rest of this entry »
After a brilliant week in Vegas I took the time to read over my notes and get you a summary of all announcements made on Citrix Synergy 2009. Up front it didn’t seem to be an event of big announcements but this turned out different. I thought they would only release the new Citrix Receiver for the Iphone (Which they did), but below you’ll find a summary of all newly announced products and upgrades.
Yesterday after a 15 hour flight and a lot of waiting in Houston we’ve arrived at the Las Vegas airport. Got our selves a cab to the MGM grand where all is going down. Registration is very quiet a 6:30 am (off course), got myself the goody bag and casino money coupons and left 
Oh by the way it was very thoughfull of Citrix to add an additional cord to the badge whch states your Citrix Status… This allow me to join the CCIA happy hour which I will attend today.
What is the biggest issue of America? Everything is bigger than anywhere else in the world which means I walk at least 8km a day from my Hotel room / Casino (MGM Grand) to the conference room (MGM Grand) and back. At least now I can explain to you why it’s called MGM GRAND.
Read more for a summary of the day.
One month ago I wrote a blogpost about using 1 or 2 vCPUs on Citrix XenApp VMs. My conclusions in that blogpost were:
- 2 vCPU terminal server (or XenApp) VMs allows more users and gives a more consistent user experience
- Use dedicated hardware (ESX cluster) for the TS/XenApp VMs
- Don’t overcommit total amount of vCPUs
I stated this conclusion to get some reactions and it worked. Because as Jason Boche commented on the article: It depends! Read the rest of this entry »
This year Virtualfuture.info will attend the Citrix Syngery event. This is a combination of 4 events (Citrix 2009 Iforum, Geek Speak Live, Virtualization Congress 2009, Network World Live). There will be a large number of virtualization experts attending a lot of different sessions. The red line through all sessions will be “Cloud Computing” and a lot of interesting peolple including Mark Templeton and Tom Flink will share their thoughts. We will try to attend as many cool sessions as we can and keep you up-to-date with the latest developments. The (somewhat complex) catalog of the sessions is available online NOW! Hope to meet you there…
SAP adopting Citrix XenServer next to VMware ESX: weird or smart ?
My first reaction was a pretty big laughter when I read the article that stated that SAP is going to use XenServer to virtualize about 500 servers. The laughter is, as Alessandro states, because of the fact that during Paul Maritz’ keynote at VMworld Europe 2009 in Cannes 2 weeks ago, SAP got over 30 minutes of (my valuable !!!) time for a (pretty boring) presentation about what amazing stuff they were doing with VMware.
