Last week I had the opportunity to sneak peak a new free tool made by VKernel named SearchMyVM Explorer. The tool is added to the vOPS Server Explorer tool and brings a long awaited and asked for feature designed to cut down time and effort in finding items in you virtual environment(s). It works very easy, you can search like you are used to in Google. Select if you want to search a VM, Resource pool, Host or Cluster with lots and lots of metrics.

This new utility provides a “Google-like” search into the virtual environment and complements the existing VM health visualization utility in vOPS Server Explorer.

The new search utility, SearchMyVM Explorer, indexes an environment‘s virtual machines, hosts, clusters, resource pools, files, snapshots, VMware tools, applications, and configuration information.

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Today VMware released the new version of their View Client for the iPad. The VMware View Client for iPad is the first iPad client with support for the PCoIP for tight integration with VMware View and increased flexibility for the end-user.

This client enables end-users to connect to their VMware View desktop from an iPad with the best possible user experience on LAN or across a WAN. For full support with this new VMware View client version 1.4, VMware View 4.6.1 or later is recommended.

Other improvements are:

• Improved connection times to View server
• Improved support for external monitors
• Bug fixes

Today I got another question about several Windows VMs breaking down and generating lots of errors after a SAN switch failed. The active paths switched through a path failover. I have seen this behavior before with several customers who use SAN storage and Windows for guest operating system in the VM. I sure had to dig around in my memory which setting to switch to 60 seconds. So I thought I would make this blog post for future references.

Path failover refers to situations when the active path to a LUN is changed from one path to another, usually because of some SAN component failure along the current path. A server usually has one or two HBAs and each HBA is connected to one or two storage processors on a given SAN array. You can determine the active path, the path currently used by the server, by looking at the LUN properties.

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One of the things that has been on my to do list for a very long time was to check out the vCenter Appliance. I finally found the time to install the vCenter appliance in my own lab and fool around with it.

This post is a mix between my findings and some kind of installation instruction.

But first of all, what’s the VMware vCenter virtual appliance and what are the pro’s, cons and limitations.

The VMware vCenter virtual appliance is a SUSE Linux Enterprise Server 11 running VMware vCenter on a internal embedded DB2 database or an external Oracle database. The appliance is available for download on the VMware website and is configured with 2 vCPUs, 8GB RAM, LSI Logic SCSI controller, VMXNET 3 network interface and the VMware Tools.

The advantages over a traditional vCenter implementations are:

• Lower TCO by eliminating Windows licenses;
• Simple and rapid deployment;
• Reduce operational costs – vCSA is easy to upgrade – deploy a new appliance, connect it to the external Oracle database or import configuration data from the previous installation.

10GbE connections are getting more common in the datacenters, even for SMB 10GbE is getting within their reach. In the storage market Dell EqualLogic lagged behind large storage vendors like NetApp in functionality and connectivity but now EqualLogic released their new products on 10GbE, solving the connectivity issue.

Both the PS6000 series for large scale implementations and the PS4000 series for the less demanding customers now have the option for 10GbE with SFP+ (fiber) or 10G Base-T (copper).

The two new models, PS6110 and PS4110, both have copper (10GBase-T) and optical (SFP+) connections. The new models can be mixed with other EqualLogic units in a group. Next to the 10Gbit connections the units have a management port for out of band management.

The PS6110 comes in six configurations with support ranging from high capacity 7,200 RPM SAS hard drives to enterprise-grade SSDs. The PS6110 Series can handle up to 72TB in a single array and 1.2 Petabytes in a single group.

In the PS6110 series is available in the following editions:

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