Today me and AJ went to HP to get more information on HP c-Class blades. Last week we borrowed a C3000 enclosure with a c460 and a c685 blade from HP for our Centric/VMware seminar and we were very happy with it. I have to confess that prior to these blades I had very limited experience with blades. The only blades I worked with were HPBL20p blades and it wasn’t very plesant. They needed huge amount of power and cooling and connections were very limited.

But as I said the new HP blades certainly surprised us, so we asked HP if we could come over and get information and maybe a demo of the new HP blade systems and especially how we can use them in our virtualization/VMware projects. (more…)

Yesterday VMware released Update 1 of their killer product vCenter Site Recovery Manager 1.0.
So what’s new in Update 1:

• New permissions required to run a recovery plan
• Full support for RDM devices
• Batch IP property customization
• Limits checking and enforcement
• Improved support for virtual machine that span multiple datastores
• Single action to reconfigure protection for multiple virtual machines
• Simplified log collection
• Improved acceptance of non-ASCII characters

It lacks the long awaited NFS support as requested in many communities but I don’t care so much as I rarely use NFS. The support for RDM is something I do like as I am a big RDM user/implementer.

For more information on the new features in this release read (more…)

Dell is working very actively to train their partners in Dell EqualLogic SANs. The training consists of a large portion of the operator training, a bit of (pre-)sales training and also a large portion was what you could call a Q&A session.

I spent the last two days in Eindhoven at Core Education together with Froos to be one of the first in our company to follow this training.

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A few product names of VMware’s product line have changed recently and while browsing some sites I suddenly noticed that I to was having trouble with these new names.

Today when I was reading the new posts in the RSS feeds I noticed VMware posted a topic on the new names.

http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2008/12/do-they-smell-a.html

Maybe it can give some of you a better insight in the name changes as it did for me.

As of today VMware View 3.0 is released and available for download. We had the privilege of beta testing the new VMware VDI solution formerly known as VDM and now it is publicly available. The evolution of VDM, VMware View is a great product with a lot of very handy and cool features. I personally like the linked clones and offline desktop feature.

VMware View 3 is available in two editions, Premier and Enterprise. The Enterprise version costs 150 USD and when you spend 100 USD more you get the Premier version which includes VMware Composer, Offline Desktop and VMware ThinApp. (more…)

It may sound a bit strange, BIOS settings causing HA problems…… At the client site were I previously had problems with faulty HP USB sticks I still experience problems. After the problems with the green USBs after 1,5 week we received new black USBs. This seemed to solve our problems, we swapped all USBs, configured all ESXi hosts and build a new cluster and enabled HA. All seemed well untill I updated all hosts with all the latest patches. (more…)

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

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