Today VMware introduced a name change and a new product suite. VMware View and VMware vCenter <old product name>. A lot of bloggers already reported this news, so I won’t go into this a lot. Just pick on of the following to read all about it:

• John Troyer
• Eric Sloof
• Edwin Friessen
• Rich Brambley
• Duncan Epping
• Eric Siebert

What’s more interesting is that VMware View Manager 3 together with VMware View Composer is released. Read the rest of this entry »

I stumbled upon a nice white paper on the VMware blog concerning virtualizing SQL servers. The conclusion of the article (how surprising) is that in high workload scenario’s it can be really interesting and usefull to virtualize your Microsoft SQL database servers.

I really advise you to read the full article, because every situation is different but for those who are lazy:

Based on the test data presented in this paper, we can conclude that:

- As the number of virtual machines is increased ESX offers linear scaling of performance until the physical CPUs are saturated.
- Fairness in resource sharing makes ESX a robust platform for hosting and consolidating virtual machines running SQL Server workloads.
- While resources are available, the CPU load on the host has minimal impact on the performance of applications running in virtual machines on that host.
- Virtual machines get the resources they need when resources are not overcommitted. Resources not used by idle virtual machines are dynamically allocated to other virtual machines that need resources without affecting performance. 

You can read the entire article here on the VMware Blog (VROOM section)

I was configuring my ESX whitebox (ESXi 3.5 update 3) and I was having some troubles with installing new VM’s. I was having problems during the installation of Windows 2003 from a mounted ISO. Some files couldn’t be copied during installation:

After I retried to copy the files, it sometimes continued copying, but after a while, I got a nice bluescreen:

From the error’s it is not directly clear that it is a memory problem, but the first thing I tried was to pull out some memory modules. The problems disappeared immediately.

Now this is why VMware advises to test the memory for 72 hours ( you can use Memtest86) before you put an ESX server in production.

A lot of dutch bloggers already mentioned that the Dutch VMUG event is on December 12th and that there is still room for a couple of attendees (600 max). So if you haven’t already registered, please do now, it is well worth it.

The agenda looks pretty good with sessions about VDI, Powershell, storage, disaster recovery and a lot more. Besides the agenda, this event is also about networking and discussion on virtualization. Expect a coverage on virtualfuture.info. We will also try to capture some video-footage.

Bloggers on the scene:
- Aleks: virtualistic.nl
- Arne: ict-freak.nl
- Bouke: jume.nl
- Duncan: Yellow-Bricks.com
- Eric: NTPRO.NL
- Gabrie: GabesVirtualWorld.com
- Joep: virtuallifestyle.nl
- Sven, Matthijs, Johan: virtualfuture.info

Normally when multiple datacenters are created in Virtual Center it is because they located at different sites aka physical datacenters. In this case the administrator created a datacenter that spanned multiple physical locations, which isn’t a good idea.

That’s why he created a new datacenter and cluster at his own location for the hosts at that site, VMotioned all running VM’s to other hosts and set the host in maintenance mode, believing that he could VMotion the running VM’s to the new datacenter. Well it went a bit different than he thought: although Virtual Center wasn’t happy VMotioning the VM’s to the new datacenter (it gave a clear warning that in the new datacenter vSwitches might be missing) it gave an OK, but when the Finish button was clicked it failed all together stating that VMotioning between datacenters isn’t allowed. 

Ok this is what he eventually did: he disconnected the host from the original Datacenter\Cluster with all VM’s still running on that host and reconnected that host to the new Datacenter\Cluster. I must admit it was pretty bold to do but it all worked because no ip-addresses/names etc were altered in this process. Whether it is a supported method I really can’t say, the only thing I know it worked for him.

In my opinion it is better to have good design and stick to it because good designs are ment to be flexible, easy to maintain and easy to expand.

Yesterday David Marshall revealed that the rumors that where already spreading around VMworld in Vegas, are true: VMware has acquired Blue Lane Technologies.

Blue Lane might be known by it’s recently lost Marketing VP Greg Ness but especially by the products ServerShield and VirtualShield. One of the reasons VMware adopted Blue Lane, according to David is:

That Blue Lane’s deep understanding of application protocols allows them to focus on network security from the physical datacenter perimeter, which has become increasingly porous, towards the ‘application perimeter’ - which consists of application-centric security policies based on the logical zoning and partitioning of applications and services rather than machine boundaries.

This might seem like a logical/useful acquisition, but is it? David looks at the matter more closer and raises a couple of very interesting questions. Read the whole story here.

Here are 2 great articles of best practices for creating templates for virtual machines. I’m referring them here as my own bookmarks:

VM Template best practices (Windows)

VM Template best practices (Linux)

One thing I learned is that you already can create thin provisioned disks in VMware ESX 3.5:

vmkfstools -c 20G -d thin /vmfs/volumes/datastore/virtualmachine_name/virtualmachine_disk1.vmdk

Big thanks to lraikhman

Yesterday VMware released version 3.5u3 of their flagship product ESX, several new features are appealing for me. In previous 3.5 versions it was not possible to tarball upgrade to those versions; gladly VMware corrected this and with the u3 version it’s possible. To do this follow the procedure in the Upgrade Guide pages 76 for ESX2 hosts and 77 for ESX3 hosts.

This u3 version incorporates a number of other features Read the rest of this entry »

So our application virtualization comparison chart seems to be very popular. We get a lot of positive responses, but one thing that we get a lot is the fact that we mention ThinApp has no central management for deploying the virtualized apps, and that it can easily be done with Active Directory. Although that is true, we still say that ThinApp has no central management for deploying the apps, just to compare it with other products that do come with a central deployment tool, like InstallFree or Microsoft App-V.

Okay, so how can you distribute ThinApp Applications? There a a lot of possibilities, I will explain 2: through Active Directory and with a login script. Read the rest of this entry »

I stumbled on a nice post on TechStrategyPartners from George Gilbert and Juergen Urbanski. It gives a clear view on which areas VMware will be putting their money on and why. It’s a pretty large piece of reading material and I had a couple of “duh” moments but the core of what they’re telling comes down to this:

We’ve all seen the light concerning server consolidation, it’s (becoming) commodity. So what, at this moment, are the areas where the money is ? According to the authors (VMware stakeholders), VMware has defined 3 waves they are setting out to ride the next period : Read the rest of this entry »