Entries from Eric Sloof

  Latest Version: Beta 2 | 6/23/08 | Build 99530


Can we start a VM in ESX 3.5 on WS 6.5 ? Yes we can :-)
The beta 2 of VMware Workstation contains a permanent fix for this problem......







New Features in VMware Workstation 6.5:

-Seamless integration of guest & host applications with Unity
-Advanced VM Record and Replay with Visual Studio integration
-Support for Smart Cards & Smart Card Readers
-Link state propagation networking
-Enhanced ACE authoring capabilities
-Easy Install Option's support for Linux
-Improved 3D graphics Support
-Virtual Machine Streaming

Chris Skinner, a Technical Trainer over at VMware created a document for clustering VirtualCenter 2.5 with MSCS. Feel free to distribute to clients and colleagues. A special thanks to Seva and Charu for challenging Chris to do this based on their VC2.0 document. This paper documents the steps to successfully implement a high availability solution for VirtualCenter 2.5 using Microsoft’s cluster services. There are some basic requirements to start the process. Microsoft requires Active Directory for cluster services. Additionally, Windows 2003 Enterprise server or higher will be necessary. This document was compiled from several sources. It demonstrates creating a VC cluster on the same ESX host (cluster-in-a-box) with a SAN-based quorum disk. The hyperlinks at the end of the document has more detailed information for other types of configurations, such as, cluster-across-boxes and physical-to-virtual.

Their customers have been asking to manage their physical and virtual infrastructures through a single console - and we know that many of you have significant investments in HP OpenView and Microsoft System Center Operations Manager.  That's why Veeam's acquisition of nworks, announced today, is exciting news for all our customers.
 
nworks' products are the Smart Plug-In for VMware for HP Software Operations Manager and the Management Pack for VMware for Microsoft Systems Center Operations Manager. These connectors allow you to directly incorporate day-to-day VMware management into enterprise management frameworks from HP and Microsoft.

By combining Veeam's resources with nworks' proven enterprise management expertise, we're moving the industry closer to eliminating the management separation of the physical and virtual worlds that has been problematic since the inception of virtual infrastructures.

Openfiler converts an industry standard x86/64 architecture system into a full-fledged NAS/SAN appliance or IP storage gateway and provides storage administrators with a powerful tool to cope with burgeoning storage needs. Building upon the popularity of server virtualization technologies such as VMware, Virtual Iron, and Xen, Openfiler can also be deployed as a virtual machine instance.

This deployment flexibility of Openfiler ensures that storage administrators are able to make the best use of system performance and storage capacity resources when allocating and managing networked storage in a multi-platform environment.

Openfiler addresses all the key data storage concerns

Reliability - Openfiler supports both software and hardware RAID with monitoring and alert facilities; volume snapshot and recovery.
Availability - Openfiler supports active/passive high availability clustering, MPIO, and block level replication.
Performance - Linux 2.6 kernel supports the latest CPU, networking and storage hardware.
Scalability - filesystem scalability to 60TB+, online filesystem and volume growth support.

What's new in Openfiler 2.3

Per-network NFS.
Tuning Enhanced CIFS Options.
Multiple NIC Bonding.
Advanced iSCSI Setup.
Fine-tune NFS client access; set wdelay,sync, origin port etc.
Advanced CIFS share configuration enables enhanced application compatibility.
Create multiple bonded NIC configurations to improve performance.
Create multiple iSCSI targets and map LUNs and snapshots.

Well they did it.  The Advanced Technical Design Guide written by Mike Laverick, Ron Olgesby and Scott Herold is finally available. Scott Herold got an email from the publisher with the following information:

I just talked to Brian, and we outlined the final steps of the process to get this book printed.  Our goal is to have this thing wrapped up and at the printer by next Friday (6/6). This means we are about 5-6 weeks out from this showing up at people's doors and it will be available for actual order soon.

Scott Herold:

I've been flooded with emails lately, as have friends of mine who are simply associated with the book for reasons of technical editing or they simply know me very well.  I know I've said it before and you are probably sick of hearing it, but we are close to done.  The content has been completed for some time.  Anyone who read the first book knows that we had a LOT of grammatical errors in it, and it took quite a bit of time to clean that up this time around.  Throw Mike Laverick into the mix, and heaven help the person that needs to edit this thing.  It's still not perfect, but will be significantly better than the first book.

A few weeks ago I conducted an interview with Mike Laverick. We were attending the VMware Virtual Desktop Manager Train The Trainer at the VMware headquarters in Frimley. At the end of the interview Mike said one or two things about the new Advanced Technical Design Guide. I recorded the interview and you can download it here.

Sven Huisman an Matthijs Haverink over at http://virtualfuture.info have written a  comparison chart with the following products:

Microsoft Softgrid
VMware ThinApp
Installfree Bridge
Citrix Application streaming
Symantec Appstream
Xenocode Virtual Application Studio

This comparison chart is an objective overview of features of the major Application Virtualization solutions. Some of the major advantages are:

• Migrate to new operating systems without upgrading or replacing legacy applications.

• Lock down corporate endpoints by running applications in user mode without locking out users.

• Minimize application conflicts and regression testing.

• Replicate your virtualized applications like any other enterprise data to maintain an instant-on fail-over plan for your applications.

Alistair Sutherland over at B2V updated their ESX command guide. This guide has been compiled by the consultants & trainers at Taupo Consulting and is based upon their personal experiences with the VMware ESX Server 3 product and is updated frequently. The information in this guide is not verified or sanctioned by VMware and they encourage their website visitors to use www.vmware.com/vmtn as the primary source of VMware product information. They are of course delighted if you find their shared experience documented in this guide of use in your environment and always appreciate being linked to.

VKernel has released its Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer virtual appliance, and they are offering a FREE 14-day trial in your own data center. Everyone implementing virtualization is — or will be — challenged by capacity bottlenecks. To maintain optimal performance in your VMware ESX environment, you really should give the Capacity Bottleneck Analyzer a try. You'll quickly be able to:

• Find current capacity bottlenecks (CPU, memory, and storage).
• Predict future capacity bottlenecks — e.g., you will experience a memory bottleneck in cluster X in 7 days.
• See exactly how many more virtual machines can fit into any of your hosts, clusters, or resource pools.

The trial is free, deployment is instant, and you'll have 2 full weeks to put it to work. Why not download the trial right now ?

Ulli Hankeln over at Sanbarrow created a new version of the VMware-liveCD this version contains:

-Workstation 6.0.2 ripped
-Converter 3.0.3 cold clone mode
-ViClient for ESX 3.5.0 u1
-RemoteCli
-Virtual Disk Developement Kit
-ViToolkit for Powershell

The complete build is about 450 MB - it requires a box with at least 512 MB RAM to load the dotnet2 apps. Latest MOA 2.3.-011 now allows to run ESX 35i in WS 6.5. beta 91182. In this case the ESX 35i is running from the LiveCD - you can of course mount any local VMFS-volumes and assign them to the ESX 35i. Obviously you need a fat machine to run this LiveCD Of course it still works as a simple Cold Clone CD .

Eric Siebert over at VMware-Land has put together a new Top 10 list featuring the Top 10 free tools that should be in every VMware administrator's toolkit. My little vmCDConnected app is on the 9th place. After a lot of late hours of coding I finally can release the vmCDConnected application. What’s so special about this application ? Well it scans all the Virtual Machines and shows if they have a CD connected to it. After scanning the VM’s you can disconnect all the CD’s with a click of  a button. Why do we need it ? Imagine you have a DRS cluster with 80 VM’s, when one of those VM’s is connected to a CD it will stay on the same ESX server because V-Motion doesn’t work in combination with a connected CD.

9) VMCdConnected - http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/172-Software.html
    • Scans all Virtual Machines and shows if they have a CD connected to it. After scanning the VM’s you can disconnect all the CD’s with a click of  a button.