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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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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