Wednesday, November 19. 2008
Become a Replicate Technologies design partner and receive one year's free RDA subscription
Replicate Technologies would like to find the installations with 40 or more ESX hosts under management. To that end, they're extending to three organizations with more than 40 ESX hosts in their datacenter, the opportunity to become a Replicate Technologies design partner. In exchange for providing us with modest amount of feedback on your experience, design partners will receive one year's free subscription for the full compliment of servers in the datacenter.
Monday, November 17. 2008
Host Profile functionality in Veeam Configurator 2.0
Saturday, November 15. 2008
Native VMware management for Zenoss 2.3 Enterprise Edition
Zenoss 2.3 includes improvements in Windows and Java application monitoring as well as native VMware management for Zenoss Enterprise Edition. Version 2.3 is also taking the opportunity to highlight over 30 new ZenPacks developed by the Zenoss community for expert monitoring of Asterisk PBX, Brocade Switches, Cisco Security Appliance, and many more. Zenoss Enterprise features Native, Agentless VMware Monitoring of Entire Virtualization Infrastructure.
- Automatic discovery and inventory of all Virtual Infrastructure (VI3) components including Virtual Machines, ESX Servers, clusters, and VMware data stores.
- Physical and Virtual resource usage and performance (memory, disk, CPU, and more).
- Real-time detection when Virtual Machines move from one VMware host (or ESX Server) to another (VMotion).
- Physical and Virtual performance and availability information correlated and displayed in a single, central web console.
Friday, November 14. 2008
Nano-sized Virtual Appliances
The Virtual Appliances at Virtualappliances.net are nano-sized virtual machines for deploying instant infrastructure and applications. They are Ubuntu Server Edition 8.04 based and available for VMware, QEMU, KVM, Parallels, Xen, Virtual Iron, Virtural PC, and Virtual Server. Available Virtual Appliances are a LAMP Server, LAPP Server, Apache Tomcat Server, and Cacti Virtual Appliance. These are the smallest, most functional, and easiest to use Virtual Appliances available. They are certified for use on VMware and Parallels.
At virtualappliances.net you can download infrastructure oriented appliances. They have 5 different appliances available.
- LAMP Server provides an easy to use Linux/Apache/MySQL/Python/Perl/PHP development and deployment server.
- LAPP Server provides an easy to use Linux/Apache/PostgreSQL/Python/Perl/PHP development and deployment server.
- Apache Tomcat Server provides a J2EE Java application server.
- Cacti provides the popular network date collection and graphing application.
- NTOP provides the realtime network traffic analysis application.
These appliances are build on Ubuntu Linux. Updates and patches are very easy to manage with the appliances using Ubuntu's own repositories for update management. As well there are hundreds of applications that can be installed on the appliances from the Ubuntu repositories.
Wednesday, November 12. 2008
Replicate Technologies | RDA Rocks
This week I’m delivering the famous VMware Install and Configure course at XTG in the Netherlands. At the end of the third day it’s time for VMotion. Three ESX servers are added to one Virtual Center server and the students have the task to make all their virtual machines VMotion compatible. I took this opportunity to upload the Replicate Technologies Datacenter Analyzer virtual appliances. After uploading I converted the Probe appliance to a template and used the Internet Explorer to logon to the RDA Controller virtual machine. Just had to configure the Virtual Center server address and user credentials, after that you’re ready to go. Update your analyses and kick off the probe deployment and the possible errors in your environment are presented at the Dashboard. In my classroom there was an issue with one of the virtual machines. This machine functions as a router and is booted from a floppy. Besides that it’s connected to an internal only virtual switch. Definitely some show stoppers for VMotion. One of the virtual machines had CPU affinity, RDA didn’t report the affinity setting, I posted a feature request at the forum. In the screen dumps you can see my findings. To conclude: easy setup, fast results, RDA rocks.
Sunday, November 9. 2008
Replicate Technologies | My RDA Dashboard
One of my weekend projects :-) is the evaluation of Replica Technologies Datacenter Analyzer. Yesterday evening I downloaded the Probe and RDA virtual appliances. This morning I started with importing the 2 virtual appliances into Virtual Center. I had to convert the Probe to a template and configure the RDA server. Everything went pretty straight forward. After a while I started my first analyses. To my great surprise RDA immediately confronted me with some faulty configured VM’s and Switches. Oren Teich is following me on Twitter and posted this tweet.
Have >10 people in the wild trying out RDA, including @scott_lowe, @depping, @esloof, & @matt_carpenter. I'm surprisingly nervous! about 10 hours ago from web.
Let’s wait and see what the others think about this new product, I’m very positive. When you click the thumbnail you will get a screen dump from my RDA Dashboard.