Last week I had a genuine bloggers-lunch at the Dutch Tax and Customs Administration with Matthijs Haverink, blogger at Virtualfuture and Rob Mokkink, the author of the HBA load balance script. We talked about various topics and I told them why I created the Resource Pool Calculator and how important it can be in large organizations, where virtual machines are deployed rapidly. Driven by my enthusiasm Rob completely rewrote my calculator script and added some real cool functions like logging to it.

This Dynamic Resource Pool Calculator recalculates all your resource pools. Depending on the number of virtual machines per resource pool, the number of reservations for memory and CPU is automatically lifted after running the Dynamic Resource Pool Calculator. The script also respects the existing individual virtual machine reservations and adds those value’s to the total RP sum.

You can get your copy here.

Richard Blythe has a breaking news announcement!

A while back I made a post asking all of you for direct feedback on, or comments to, the VMware Knowledgebase Team, of which I am a member at VMware. First, be assured that I have taken every single comment and forwarded it onto my management, who are very interested in this type of interaction.  So much so, that I have gotten the go-ahead to create a brand new official VMware blog, called VMware Knowledgebase Blog here. Bookmark this page now and watch for our welcome message soon.  (That’s how fresh this news is, we don’t have a welcome message yet!) The whole Knowledgebase Team looks forward to getting our word out there and hearing what you have to say.

VMware Knowledgebase Blog

News and announcements from the VMware Knowledgebase Team

Georgia Southern University’s College of Information Technology, the only one of its kind in the Southeast United States, is now one of only 10 universities in the world to teach the cutting-edge technology of virtualization on VMware software, thanks to VMware and a donation of computer equipment by Corus Consulting and Canvas Systems.

Corus Consulting and Canvas Systems values the equipment at $126,000 but professors in the College of Information Technology said it is hard to put a price on what the donation will add to an IT student’s education and career potential long term.

Designated a VMware Academy, Georgia Southern University’s College of Information Technology may teach VMware courses and certify students as Virtualization Certified Professionals. This certification saves future employers thousands of dollars in training costs and makes Georgia Southern graduates much more competitive in the job market. The designation as a VMware Academy was one of the key elements that impressed executives with Corus Consulting and Canvas Systems and prompted the computer equipment donation.

Belgian/Dutch reference case showing the unique benefits of a virtual desktop (VMware View) combined with the special Ultra Thinclients from SUN Microsystems.

Erik is not the first VMTN community contributor who started a weblog, we can find Tom Howarth over at PlanetVM and Alan Renouf (no he isn’t French) shares his ramblings at the redesigned Virtu-Al. If you’re really looking for a VMware Technical Deepdive, you should pay a visit to Erik Zandboer’s VMdamentals Blog. In its short existence it already contains some great articles like

• VMware Infrastructure Resource Settings Sagas
• Scaling VMware hot-backups (using esXpress)
• Performance tab “Numbers” demystified

BreakingPoint announced the BreakingPoint Application Protocol for VMware VMotion enabling Network Equipment Manufacturers (NEMs) and Service Providers to emulate VMware VMotion traffic at speeds of up to 40 Gigabits per second in their test environment. When combined with the BreakingPoint Application Protocol for NFS and SMB/CIFS, it eliminates the costs and delays of testing a VMware ESX server infrastructure and Storage Area Network (SAN).

Mike Hamilton, Director of Product Marketin:

“VMware VMotion provides enormous benefits for data centers, including high availability and performance, while enabling load balancing and resource optimization. Using BreakingPoint you can emulate this application running on TCP port 8000, the communication between the VMware ESX servers, the TCP connection with the new destination server and even the ICMP echo request to ensure the seamless transfer of the connections between the old and new server. BreakingPoint testing tools provide an unmatched level of testing realism and performance in a small footprint device, supplying people with more accurate performance and security testing results and helping them accelerate the development and deployment of their network equipment.”

Carter's team created some really cool VI Toolkit 1.5 video's.

Managing Storage with VI Toolkit 1.5
Some important fixes in VI Toolkit 1.5
Get-Stat Improvements in VI Toolkit 1.5
Resizing Guest Disks with Invoke-VMScript
HA and DRS in VI Toolkit 1.5

Carter Chanklin, Product Manager at VMware's End User Enablement, released a new version of the VI toolkit. The VI Toolkit 1.5 team has added 32 new cmdlets, enhanced the existing cmdlets, and fixed tons of bugs. If you’re the sort of person who loves fine print, you can also have a look at their release notes. The release notes has a great table that shows all the differences between 1.0 and 1.5.

The VI Toolkit 1.5 team

More and more companies are choosing to virtualize and consolidate their server environments with VMware to achieve smaller footprints and reduced operating costs, but optimizing the virtualized environment is nearly impossible without a solid strategy in place. This complete guide to VMware Virtual Infrastructure 3 (VI3) teaches readers how to plan for, implement, secure, maintain, monitor and troubleshoot a VI3 environment.

VMware VI3 Implementation and Administration By: Eric Siebert Last Updated on Safari: 2008/12/12 Publisher: Prentice Hall Pub Date: June 26, 2009 (estimated) Pages: 400

"VMware delivered a solid fourth quarter to cap off a successful 2008. We have been executing well in a difficult economy," said Paul Maritz, president and chief executive officer of VMware. "Customers continue to make VMware a strategic priority because our solutions - used by more than 130,000 customers - help reduce capital and operational costs."

"In 2008, we made strategic investments in our technology, partnerships and business operations that position us well for 2009 and beyond," continued Maritz. "We are making solid progress on our three key initiatives to build on our virtualization leadership in the datacenter, the cloud and on the desktop. We are executing on our product roadmap, strengthening our ecosystem of partners, and bolstering our management team - both globally and operationally. VMware is well-prepared for the opportunities and challenges ahead."

Continue reading "VMware Reports Fourth Quarter and Full Year..." »

Forbes Guthrie over at vmreference.com has released an update of his vmreference card. There over a dozen corrections, updates, and a few small additions. He wants to thank everyone who has emailed him since the last release, particularly Simon Price and Peter Vroomen.