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

While reading some of the RRS feeds I stumbled onto an article about Intelligent Application Gateway (IAG) 2007 SP2. Now you might say, what is so special about a servicepack? Well in this case it means that you can run IAG 2007 virtual!!!

First off what is IAG? IAG is a Microsoft solution to provide mobile and remote users an easy and flexible way to securely access their company networks. It provides users with a SSL and VPN connection wich can be made from almost any device ( pc, kiosk, mobile device). (more…)

We did a lot of testing lately with VDM for a proof of concept for a client and for our Centric/VMware seminar. One of the things we found missing was the cleanup of computer accounts after a VM was deleted.

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Yesterday, after weeks of preparation, it was finally time to treat our clients to a day of VMware delight.

The last days especially were very very hard, I must agree with AJ, everyone who claims IT is a 9-to-5 job is insane.

Thanks to Marc we received a HP C3000 blade enclosure with a 480c and a 685c blade on Monday which we will use to build a VDI demo/hands-on lab. After a last meeting with the guys from VMware we also had to contact some of our personal clients to attend the seminar. (more…)

While designing a virtual infrastructure you have to consider a lot of options: Are we going for ‘normal’ server or do we use blades, are we going for an iSCSI SAN or are we going for a FC SAN, etc.

If you got your infrastructure divided over a couple of locations you got even more things to consider like one or more VirtualCenter servers, centralizing servers or placing ESX Hosts on decentral locations.

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IT is no 9 to 5 business. I must admit, some of the time it is my own doing, but sometimes it should be avoidable.

I had a discussion with a coworker in the sales department about this. I said that we spend more time on our work than he. He found it a bold remark.

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In the last week these items are added or edited in VMware’s Knowledgebase at http://kb.vmware.com

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I just got my hands on a laptop in our dance school (something with digitizing video’s as an excuse ) so I thought it would be funny to post some links to some VMware related video’s for the slow monday morning.. Just to get back into the rhythm of the week

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Today I received a reminder of the September VMware licensing change.  In short a processor may now contain a maximum of 6 cores instead of 4. Prices have not changed.

This is very good news for VMware end users who can benefit from increased processor performance at no extra cost.

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Title: Centric/VMware event
Location: Koperen Hoogte, Zwolle, The Netherlands
Language: Dutch
Register: Click here
Description: An event organised by Centric together with VMware. VDI and SRM presentation and demos will be given.
Speakers: Ton Hermes (VMware), Willem van Engeland (VMware), Edwin Weijdema(Centric), Marcel Timmermans (Centric), Peter Goosens (Saxion)
Start time: 9:00
Date: 2008-11-27
End time: 17:00

Yesterday I wrote a blog on faulty HP ESXi 3.5 USB keys which cost me a lot of time troubleshooting. Today I received a link from a collegue (thnx Egbert) with more information on the subject.

Here HP Support document c01605187 which was released Nov 13th.

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A lot of companies still have some doubts or fears for virtualizing Exchange, so I compiled some information on virtualization Exchange on VMware ESX.

There are already a lot of articles and posts on this subject.  Below you find a couple of links to these articles and posts:

• Deploying Microsoft Exchange in VMware Infrastructure
  http://www.vmware.com/resources/techresources/701
  

• High Availability and Disaster Recovery for Exchange using VMware Infrastructure 3
  http://www.vmware.com/landing_pages/exchange_solution.html

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It’s a new hype and many blog have reported on this subject, ‘SRM in a box‘

I’m not going to write a totaly new blog on this subject, instead I will give you a few nice links and give all credits to Tomas Ten Dam, Eric Sloof and Arne Fokkema.

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At the same client site where we had the problems with VMware Update Manager and ESXi we are now struggling with HA. We can NOT get it to work and even WMware support can NOT get it to work either. We have been on the phone with VMware support for almost a week now and have tried various fixes but none of them work. We created a hosts-file to rule out DNS problems, we added advanced HA settings like ‘das.allowNetwork[n]‘ and ‘das.allowVmotionNetworks‘, we created new clusters, checked FT_HOST files and deleted all host from the cluster to build it again from scratch. All without positive results.

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In the last week these items are added or edited in VMware’s Knowledgebase at http://kb.vmware.com

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Today we attended the Storage Expo in the Jaarbeurs in Utrecht, the Netherlands. Basically there was very little news but it was nice to see some nice features live in action and get some hands-on experience.

We visited Dell EqualLogic, HP, Lefthand, EMC, etc and saw some real nice storage solutions and got some valueable information on some problems we encounter(ed). I especially liked the private demo at the Dell EqualLogic stand by Jody. He gave us some cool demos of Snapshot Manager for ESX, Snapshot Manager for Microsoft and Site Recovery Manager. Very convincing stuff, Jody thanks very much for your time.

Also at the Dell EqualLogic stand we saw the new PS5500E, a 4U chassis which can house 48TB storage. A very cool new SAN which delivers a high storage density in a relatively small enclosure.

Al-in-all a very interesting and valueable day.

Last night I was reading some virtualization blogs (vblogs ) and an article on boche.net caught my eye.
This article stated that a VMware employee, Richard Garsthagen,  revealed that after a very long period of waiting VMware decided that it’s going to support Distributed Power Management (DPM) in the next release.

[Crowd is going wild]

It’s not clear what this means exactly. The next release? Is this Update 4 or VI4?

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VMware announced the Mobile Virtualization Platform. WIth it it should be possible to run multiple operating systems next to eachother on a smartphone.

MVP is built on technology acquired from Trango Virtual Processors in October 2008. MVP will help handset vendors reduce development time and get mobile phones with value-added services to market faster. End users will also benefit by being able to run multiple profiles – for example, one for personal use and one for work use – on the same phone.

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I came across some scripts to run on your ESX server after it has been installed. These script did some stuff like disabling firewall and enabling root logon from a remote system.

Although it looks like it makes your life easier now you can logon with root from a remote system I would urge you not to do these kind of things.

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I’m from the pre-WIMP era, like in pre Windows, Icons, Mouse, Pointers. There wasn’t anything like a graphical user interface. Even when they emerged like Norton Commander and PC Tools I still did most of my work from the commandline. Stuff like 4DOS enriched my life so I could get the most out of the commandline.

I still try to do most of my stuff from commandline. I’m very happy that companies like Microsoft see that there are more people that want to do their stuff from that commandline. Hence PowerShell. PowerShell can do some great tricks like doing an action on all servers in your infrastructure with one line of code.
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In one of our previous projects we suggested a LUN to use for ISO’s. The client said: ‘Well, we don’t need one, we have all our software on network shares and operating systems are deployed by the means of an unattended install with boot from network’.

It didn’t matter how much I talked and how much advantages I could name, they wouldn’t give in.

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Today VMware has released ESX/ESXi 3.5 Update 3.

In the release notes I found the following changes:

• Increased number of vCPUs per core limit (from 8 to 20);
• New supported servers, NICs and storage I/O controllers;
• New supported Guest Operating Systems.

Besides that there are many improvements and bug fixes.

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VMware has a couple of nice podcasts which give you some insight in their products. These podcast are already avaiable for some time but I wouldn’t hold this from you.

Couple of podcast mentioned on the site:

• Introduction to Virtualization
• Top 4 differences between ESXi and Server 2
• Virtualize in Minutes with VMware ESXi
• Enhancing your Profitability with VMware

Nice listening material for a friday afternoon

http://www.vmware.com/resources/podcasts/

Yesterday I installed 5 new ESXi3.5 host at a client site, installed VirtualCenter and VMware Update Manager. I configured all hosts with storage, networking, licensing and ntp settings. All looked fine and ready to rock. One last action before starting with our test plan was to update all hosts to the latest patch level and that’s where the ‘fun‘ started.

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We had a small issue today with a virtual machine at one of our customer sites. We were unable to do a VMotion. The message we got was that there was an ISO image connected to the system.

Well, we tried all the standard things like being tenacious and clicking Yes on the question if I wanted to continue the VMotion (which failed ofcourse) and trying to edit it from within VirtualCenter. Unfortunately the option to edit was grayed out. Hmm..

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After the earlier news that Cisco was enlarging its stake in VMware now the news gets out that Intel sold half of its shares.

Intel disclosed that it had recently sold 1 million shares in the virtualization software maker and plans to sell another 3.75 million VMware shares on the open market. 500.000 of these shares were bought by Cisco. Another 500.000 were bought by EMC, VMware’s mother company.

After the rumors of Intel buying VMware from EMC one has to wonder what the future has in store for VMware. Also Cisco’s membership of Microsoft’s Server Virtualization Validation Program and the expansion of shares gives enough to speculate about.