Today, Gartner published the first-ever Magic Quadrant for the x86 Server Virtualization market, naming VMware as the only vendor in the leadership quadrant, with a sizeable advantage over all competitors. Simply put, from the most trusted voice in the IT market, VMware is the only market leader.

According to this VMware is “clearly ahead in”:

• understanding the market
• product strategy
• business model
• technology innovation, product capabilities
• sales execution (more…)

A couple of weeks ago I had a problem where the connection between a snapshot and its parent disk was gone. The parent was a raw device mapping pointing to a LUN on a SAN. This all happened during a migration from one type of SAN to another. For the migration we had to remove the Raw Device Mappings from a virtual machine in order to move it with Storage VMotion. After the move the original RDM had to be re-added to the virtual machine. The final step was to copy the original data from the RDM to a new disk.

One of the steps in our migration plan was to make sure that there weren’t any snapshots on the virtual machine. This procedure was used during the whole migration. One of my colleagues and I were planned for the last batch of servers.

Everything went OK during the migration of this server. All steps were executed without errors. The server started like it always starts. Even the first check by the administrators looked good.

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It is always nice to see how Citrix fan-boys reacts on publications about VMware View. Especially when it comes to an comparison or XenApp for View trade in. It is often said that Citrix listens to their customers but they are seldom heard! People need simple solutions in a complex IT world. Why pay for a very high end piece of engineering like a Ferrari if I can get the job done with a Volkswagen! OK, it is nice to have a car that nobody else has and can do 320 km/h but in times were budgets are under pressure, I have a hard time defending expensive, complex and high-end solutions.

The fact that VDI is putting a significant load on the storage is true, but that counts for every VDI solutions including XenDesktop, so no differences there. Also the new upcoming version of View includes a basic profile management solution “Persona Management”. Which makes the use of linked clones a very workable solution.

When you compare installing View and XenDesktop you will see the following diagram.

When it comes down to management consoles the two solutions also look very different.

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As a reaction on the Citrix program to trade in your VMware View licenses for XenDesktop, VMware comes with a program to trade in your XenApp licenses for VMware View.

The trade in program is quite simple: For the price of 3 years XenApp SA (€ 182,-) you will get View Premier and 3 years SnS.

VMware’s offer differs from the one from Citrix in a few way’s.

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Last week Erik encountered a small issue which required him to change the access to almost all volumes on an  EqualLogic storage infrastructure.

Although EqualLogic has a great interface compared to others, it doesn’t allow changing volume access for multiple volumes at the same time. If you have have to change a lot of volumes you have a couple of options: by hand in the GUI, scripting or command line. (I hope this stays that way to be honest)

Changing volume after volume in the GUI is painstaking and prone to errors. So in my opinion is scripting or command line the way to go. Since I needed him for a review for a document I quickly typed some commands for him. After connecting with SSH to the storage group this is all what you need to change a lot of volumes with some easy commands. (more…)

Dell EqualLogic has a integration kit for integrating their storage solution with VMware and various Mirosoft products. In this Host Integration Kit you find AutoSnapshotManager/VMware Edition and the AutoSnapshotManager/Microsoft Edition.

While I was searching for information about when to use which edition of AutoSnapshotManager for EqualLogic I came across the website of Marc Malotke which I think is worth sharing.  If I did my googling right Marc Malotke works for Dell as a Enterprise Solution Specialist.

He had some very interesting posts and news items at his blog:

• EqualLogic: SCOM Management Pack Release
• Equallogic:  ASM editions
• Equallogic: Planning your IP addresses

Blog: http://www.marcmalotke.net

twitter: @MarcDELL