VMGuru.nl – I choose (a virtual) life!

Looking for information about iSCSI, Cisco and VMware I stumbled onto a document which I want to share with all of you. Want to know about vswitches, portgroups, security, ether channels, scalability, security, performance, VLAN tagging, N-port ID virtualization, iSCSI implementations?

In ‘VMware Infrastructure 3 in a Cisco Network Environment‘ all ins and out of VMware networking are described. 90 pages of pure networking wisdom.

Another valueable document I found is the VMware iSCSI Design Considerations and Deployment Guide. When you are designing and /or implementing an iSCSI solution this is a document you should read.

Virtualization is hot! A lot of companies are already virtualized or in the middle of a migration. The physical platform gets replaced by a virtual one. This directly introduces a new whipping boy.

In the past users and administrators looked at stuff that could cause the performance problems. These days it seems that it’s easier just to put the blame on the virtualization layer.

0000ee;">

(more…)

I spend a lot of hours in traffic jams lately. It’s really driving me nuts.
All those break lights, slow moving cars.. Man, your mind starts to wonder..

‘What if life was a virtual machine’?

Life sure would get easier I think. Just look at the pro’s.

You just could VMotion to your work. Instead of taking ‘the pleasure’ of traffic-jam-blues you arrive at your destination in a couple of seconds. If you need more processing power during the day you can move to another body with more brain capacity, like someone who didn’t drink away all his brain cells.

(more…)

Yesterday was a fun day. What looked like a simple, clean upgrade became something more interesting. After making a before snapshot I started the VirtualCenter installation wizard. Then the fun started. Nothing happened.

Let me rephrase that. NOTHING happened. Machine hung. Clicking the reboot button in the VI client caused the machine to reboot. At least, so it seemed.

The machine didn’t get back to life. VirtualCenter thought that it was in limbo, not started and not shutdown. So I restarted the management services on the ESX host, you know, service mgmt-vmware restart and I even restarted the VirtualCenter client by hand like service vpxa restart

It looked like the problem got bigger. VirtualCenter now saw the machine as invalid. Logging on the ESX host with the VI client it looked very very strange.

(more…)

October 13th I met Eric Sloof, the man behind NTPRO.NL, at the VMware Partner Forum 2008 in Brasschaat. He was busy filming various presentations. Today I visited Erik’s site and discovered his video collection. If you are interested in the ‘live’ presentations of VMWorld 2008 or some nice product demo’s, check out Erik’s videos on Vimeo.

Here are three of my favorites:

• Brian Madden VDI versus Terminal Services Video
• VMworld 2008 | VMware Site Recovery Manager Video
• Designing the Next Generation Data Center – Cisco and VMware

For all who have not seen ESXi4 beta or presentations at VMWorld 2008, VMware announced a new feature called Fault Tollerance (FT). A system with two virtual machines in an active/passive configuration. All instructions that are executed on the active virtual machine are copied over a high speed network to the passive virtual machine. When the active virtual machine fails the passive virtual machine takes over with zero downtime so no service interruption.

This information is based on a ESXi4 beta so there is no guarantee that this feature will appear in the final product.

A demo of this feature can be found here.

(more…)

Sorry, my bad! But I cleaned up my own mess…..

Grtx,
TAZZ

Hello folks,

Our brand new site is going like crazy. Unfortunately some “not to be named” human element in our infrastructure caused a minor glitch in the website’s config. Therefore subpages may not work. The problem is noted and being looked into, no promises on a solution however.

Sorry for any inconveniences,

Cheers,

Sid

On Gabes Virtual World I read an article with the title ‘Unbelievable Hyper-V performance ‘. At first I was a bit shocked by the title. Hyper-V good performance? That the complete opposite to my own experience with Microsofts virtualization attempt. But luckily what Gabe ment was ‘Unbelievable BAD Hyper-V performance ‘.

You can read the complete article here.

Conclusion
A max score of 1,875 VMs per core where VMware ESX on the same hardware does 3,5 VMs per core. Maybe the test is not 100% accurate but with these scores maybe someone should step up and do a real hypervisor performance comparison (same hardware, load, etc).

I just recieved an e-mail presenting Hervé Clement as the new VMware VAC Manager for the Benelux.

[...]
“This is with great pleasure that I’m joining today the VAC Benelux communauty as the Manager of the VAC Program for Benelux. I’ve been working with VMware for 2 years and a half mainly in VMware Professional Services Organization and took the ownership of the VAC Program for Southern Europe last July joining VMware Partner Organization.”
[...]

Hervé good luck in your new job and hope to see/speak too you soon.

With the release of VMware ESX/ESXi 3.5 and VirtualCenter 2.5 U3 VMware implemented a few interesting changes in it’s HA implementation.  In this document VMware HA and the latest changes are descibed in detail.

This document is intended for experienced HA cluster admins who are planning to migrate to Update 3 as well as admins who are interested in the explanation of some cluster essentials.

Let’s give a big hand to VMware for revealing some details for Virtual Desktop Manager 3 on VMworld 2008. Now we can finally talk about it without violating our NDA.

• Offline VDI
• Scalable Virtual Images
• Universal client

(more…)

On VMWorld 2008 in Vegas VMware announced it’s new vCloud- and Virtual DataCenter OS (VDC-OS) initiative.

VMware vCloud offers any customer elastic, on-demand compute capacity for their applications, on or off premise.

Virtual DataCenter OS is VMware’s new approach to expand its flagship ‘VMware Infrastructure‘ into a virtual datacenter OS with the release of some new products.

(more…)

This problem exists since the release of Update 2 but I still get a lot of questions from collegues who run into this. After you upgrade your VirtuaCenter version 2.5 Update 2 guest customization stops working. When deploying virtual machines from a template sysprep does not run after the first boot. I had to first manually login and then they would start or after waiting a really long time without login. This is a known issue and will be fixed in Update 3. For the time being VMware released a fix in the following kb article.

Hello folks!

Soon this site will host the dutch vmguru.nl content. We are working on that both on the technical as well as on the informational content side. So stay tuned, more to come very soon!

Cheers and greetz,

Sid