Entries from Eric Sloof

Today one of the attendees in the Virtual Infrastructure 3 Install and Configure class discovered a new ESX 3.5 warning. When you want to use the VI-Client to take over the console of a virtual machine and at the same moment you are already on this VM running the VI-client. Are you still following me ;-) ? The following warning will appear in the console screen. By the way the WebAcces console doesn’t throw this error and is still singing around.

Yesterday Dave over at vm-help.com posted a comment on the ultimate white box article with an URL. I tough let’s give it a try and visited his website. What I saw there was incredible, a complete list with Motherboards and unsupported servers that work with ESX 3.5 and / or 3i Installable.

VMware plans to improve virtual infrastructure through technologies such as high availability, automatic restart, better tolerance and masking of hardware failure, and site disaster recovery, the company's chief scientist and co-founder, Mendel Rosenblum, told reporters in Bangalore last Monday. A virtual machine would, for example, be able to record its execution on another virtual machine in a compact form, so that if one of them dies the other one takes over, Rosenblum said. He did not disclose the time frame when products based on these technologies will be available.

On the same day Marathon Technologies Corporation announced everRun VM, the world’s first fault-tolerant, high availability software for server virtualization. Based on the same everRun® automated availability software employed by over 1800 organizations, everRun VM prevents outages and data loss in Citrix XenServer virtual infrastructures. The significance of this new software for the IT industry is threefold:

1. Companies can now reliably run high value production applications in virtual machines, gaining the benefits of virtualization across a much broader range of applications.

2. It will now be practical to make high availability and DR a standard part of the IT infrastructure for midsize and larger companies.

3. A key component is in place to accelerate the next wave of server virtualization adoption.

Since running ESX 3.5 on Workstation 6 seems to be impossible, I had to find another way to explore the new features of ESX 3.5. Searching for a cheap supported configuration isn’t an easy job. You have to find a supported motherboard, network card and SATA controller. I have found a desktop with all these items combined. You can use The HP Compaq d530 - Small form factor (SFF)  DG755A desktop.  My model has a CPU from Intel Pentium 4 CPU 2.8 GHz, a NIC from Broadcom Corporatoin NetXtreme BCM5782 Gigabit Ethernet and a SATA 82801EB (ICH5) SATA Controller. I added a 512 Mb memory bank so I have 1 Gigabyte in total. Enough to host a few virtual machines :-).

A few days ago I posted my first video on blip.tv. John Troyer suggested this site and told me that the quality is much better than for instance YouTube. I created a trailer for the upcoming VMworld event in Lag Vegas. The voice over is done by the famous Dutch disk jockey Jeroen van Inkel who recorded this jingle for my radio show “the Twilight zone�? which was broadcasted for over 10 years on a few radio stations in the Netherlands. I must say that blip.tv rocks. It has a nice user interface, quick uploading and converting and a great quality. Stay tuned for my video reports from Las Vegas.

Last week one of my students pointed me to an interesting site. The Holy Hypervisor contains columns written in Dutch and English the content raised my eyebrows and changed my point of view.




The site is dedicated to the hypervisor. The hypervisor saves you money, and that's what makes it great! It can also make some other things easier. Along with the money saving, it makes the hypervisor one of the most pleasant things in computing. What it does you ask? It partitions a piece of hardware in more pieces of virtual hardware, so it seems like you have more hardware than you actually purchased.

Many bloggers already discovered the video on YouTube showing that Hyper-V Quick Migration breaks network connections. In other words quick migration in the beta of Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor leads to network connection failures in virtual machines. VMware created their own page on blib.tv showing a comparison between VMotion and Quick migration and  VMware VMotion does not break network connections. VMotion in VMware Virtual Infrastructure leaves network connections intact as virtual machines travel from one physical server to another. Sometimes a video says more than a hundred words ;-)

During the first month of GA, Veeam Backup was heavily downloaded and evaluated by their customers. The development team received a lot of useful feedback that helped them to create the new product update.

What's new in Veeam Backup 1.0.1:

1. VMware VCB 1.1 support.
2. Improved performance for backup, replication and file-level restore .
3. Light version of setup is available now.
4. Various bug fixes and improvements.

I just had a short email conversation with Chris Akerberg and he confirmed that David Bieneman has left Vizioncore. Chris has taken over David’s responsibilities and is heading Vizioncore from now on as president. I’m wondering what David’s plans are, but I think that we’ll hear from him soon. Maybe he’s creating another great invention like he did with his Ranger a few years ago.

A short quote from Quest Software: David has indicated that he is going to work independently on new product ideas.

Scott Herold over at VMguru.com is building up his lab. He is still waiting for the Dell server to arrive, but today he completed the installation of the iSCSI server.

I was able to finally build my iSCSI server a while back and wanted to highlight some of the details of this particular system. I wanted to try to do something unique with this configuration that would help to support a higher-end workload than a typical server.