Recently QNAP gave us the opportunity to review their QNAP TS-459Pro II NAS solution. We gladly accepted this opportunity and we got the NAS shipped to us a few weeks ago.

The TS-459Pro II is a NAS device that is aiming at the SMB market. QNAP also has bigger versions in the TS line that could be used in larger organizations. The TS-459Pro II is certified as VMware and Citrix Ready and is compatible with Windows 2008 Hyper-V and fail-over clustering.

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It’s only one week until the annual dutch VMUG with a very impressive speaker line-up. Many international speakers are going to deliver great sessions and workshops at the Nieuwegein Business Center (NBC) on December 9th.

If you’re interest and work involves virtualization and you haven’t registered yet, you should!. This is an event you should NOT miss. Like last year the NBC in Nieuwegein will be packed with people and be host to great speakers in their field of expertise.

If you’re interest and work involves virtualization and you haven’t registered yet, you should! This is an event you should NOT miss. If you haven’t signed in yet you can do so here.

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This week Veeam released their latest version of their Backup & Replication software “Veeam Backup & Replication v6“. With their latest release they offer enhanced scalability and performance.

They also add support for Microsoft Hyper-V so you can protect your multi-hypervisor environment with only one product, from a single console.

New features in version 6 are:

• A new distributed architecture for better scalability. Deployment and Maintenance for remote office and large installations are simplified;
• Advanced replication by combining both backup and replication in to one solution;
• Multi-hypervisor support with the new support for Microsoft Hyper-V. The console let’s you manage both VMware and Hyper-V hosts from a single console;
• 1-Click file restore is an enhancement on the existing “Instant File-Level Recovery” reducing the number of steps needed from 10 to 1.

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With everyone being busy it has been some time since the last update of the build numbers database, but now I found the time and now it updated. Apart from some updates on products that where there already, I also added a few other products to the list.

If you think there is a product missing that should be up on the list, let us know in the comments below.

A client was asking me if it was possible to install the VMware tools inside VM’s without having to reboot them right after. I knew it was possible and went looking for a way on doing so. During the search I found several scripts made by people which looked good (some out of date), but for most of them you had to made slight adjustments to the script to make them work for your own environment. The client wasn’t really looking for a script to maintain so I continued the search.

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The competition in the VDI space is fierce and VMware is slowly closing the gap with the features their products are offering compared to the competition.

Although the gap is closing VMware is still very much in the lead when it comes to setting up and administrating the virtual environment.

On the YouTube channel vmwareview there are four video’s released showing some administrating tasks for both VMware view 4.6 and Citrix XenDesktop 5.

Each video aims at a different task:

• Video one is about creating a master image
• Video two shows how to create a desktop pool
• Video three shows how the add/remove a desktop
• Video four is showing how to remove a desktop pool

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Yesterday shortly after we posted the review about the StarWind iSCSI SAN software there was a press release by Starwind. The press release announced that they had passed the VMware Certification Program for VMware ESX 4.1 server. The press release can be found here.

In short this means that the Starwind iSCSI SAN software has passed the test labs from VMware and will now be included in the VMware compatibility guide.

Recently Starwind contacted us and asked if we would be interested in doing a review on their iSCSI SAN software solution. The enthusiasts that we are, we quickly replied that we would take the challenge. After some e-mails back and forth and setting up a small test lab we where ready to go.

So what is the Starwind iSCSI SAN solution? The solution enables you to change a Windows server into a iSCSI SAN. With this solution Starwind is mainly aiming for SMB organizations. As far that I could see the Starwind solution offers the same (basic) functionality as you would expect from the hardware counterparts.

Some of the key features mentioned by Starwind are:

• Synchronous Data Replication: Real-time data replication across a 2 node storage cluster.
• High Availability / Automatic Failover: Fault tolerant active-active technology eliminates a single point of failure.
• Remote Replication across a WAN: replicates data to a remote location allowing multi-site disaster recovery in the event of a disaster at the primary site.
• CDP & Snapshots: captures instant, point-in-time volume images, allowing a user to rollback and recover an entire volume or individual files and folders.
• High Speed Caching: accelerates storage I/O by using the server’s memory.
• Server clustering: supports Windows Server 2008, Hyper-V, VMware ESX and vSphere 4.0 and other applications.
• Central Management Console / User Interface: allows IT professionals to easily manage all storage from a central management console built on the same tree structure used in Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere.

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Yesterday Anne Jan linked me to an article on the VMware website which contained information on a free online training course. The title is Transition to ESXi Essentials. The course is dedicated to ESXi and depending on your learning style it takes about 3 hours to complete. It’s broken up in several chapters so you don’t have to do all at once.

Since VMware is moving towards ESXi, abandoning ESX with its Service Console, it’s a great time to release a course all about ESXi and how to manage it.

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I sometimes wonder why some things in the industry go so quick, while on the other hand things go so slow. One of the things that goes so slow are the products that make use of the VMsafe API.  Oké last year a couple of security vendors announced their first steps along this road, but only Trend Micro came out with a 1.0 product. Although the VMsafe API framework is there for quite a long time , the industry does not make use of its full functionality.

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As with most products you want to keep them up to date for several reasons, which can include security, availability, reliability or even new features in the product. Keeping products up to date is a process that keeps repeating itself and needs a good plan to keep up with the most recent updates.

A lot of times though you will see that an organization isn’t on top of the update process, either because they aren’t aware of it or just forget to execute the tasks for updating their products.

The following BBC News article shows what might happen when you’re not keeping your system up to date. Several companies have become victims of the the Sasser virus which interrupted their normal operations.

Recently I have been doing a quick look at an VMware ESX infrastructure in which I noticed they did install the VMware update manager. They also had a baseline configured and attached to several ESX hosts and every evening there was a scheduled task to check for new updates available.

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For those who could not attend to this years VMworld in Copenhagen, VMware is hosting a community roundtable featuring a recap of VMworld 2010 in Copenhagen.

The show is planned for Wednesday 20th October at 20.00 GMT ( 15.00 EDT / 21.00 GMT+1 ). The link to the site can be found here.

I will definitely tune in and likely some other VMGuru.nl crew members.

At the client site that I’m currently working they are using these USB anywhere hubs from Digi. These USB hubs give you the ability to use USB on virtual machines over a TCP/IP connection. Each USB hub can service one virtual machine and holds up to 4 USB ports.

The down side of these USB hubs is that they can take up quite some room in the datacenter. The currently used type  isn’t rack mountable and for each virtual machine you  need a new USB hub, even if you don’t use all 4 ports.

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Some weeks ago I posted an article about some bad network performance when moving VMs to a new ESX host.

Last week I got an e-mail which announced some updates and among it was the one promised to us by the engineer that helped us with our problem.

Description of the patch is exactly what we where experiencing with our VMs:

“When you access remotely using Remote Desktop Protocol (RDP) from a client machine to a Microsoft Windows virtual machine with TCP segmentation offload (TSO) enabled and EnablePMTUDiscovery parameter set to 0, the network connection is slow and sometimes, the connection might not work. This issue is reported on Broadcom bnx2x NICs, such as BCM57710, BCM57711, BCM57711E, etc.” http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1026129

After installing the patch on one of the ESX hosts we tested with a test VM on a patched and an unpatched ESX host and there was a clear difference in performance. The logon on the VM was much faster on the ESX host with the patch.

For us the patch fixed the problem and we are now deploying it on all the ESX hosts.

We got a happy customer again.

At a client site we came upon a problem with Windows 2003 VM’s. They would get low network performance when we moved them to a newly formed ESX cluster consisting of HP 460c G6 blades. In some cases logging on to the server with a remote session took about 20 minutes.

As I mentioned this only occurred when we moved a VM to the new cluster, but also VM’s that where newly installed would get the same problem when running on the new cluster. As we are using Altiris to install and configure new VM’s a colleague decided to install a new VM by going through the steps manually which normally would be done by Altiris and found out that after the activation of a security template the performance dropped significantly.

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Up until a week ago, I hadn’t had the pleasure to work a lot with vSphere. Now with a test environment at the customer site I was able to freely play a bit with vSphere. One of the features I was curious on trying was Fault Tolerance (FT). I just created a random VM and enabled FT on it which all went fine.

After FT was enabled on the VM we wanted to see how we could upgrade the ESX hosts in that cluster as the documentation states that FT only works on hosts with the same build number.

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On the site www.vReference.com I came across a post announcing the “vSphere 4 reference card”. Wondering what this was I started reading the post.

It seems that Forbes Guthrie made a document containing hard limits for the vSphere 4 products. I found the list of items very wide and should come in handy when looking for limits of the vSphere 4 products.

The reference card is refreshed every now and then, so check out the site periodically. Or subscribe to the RSS feed of the site.

Hopefully this card can help you as future reference. I found it to be very helpful.

Moments after Erik posted about vCenter vs VDI,  I got problems with the VMware View 3.1.1 environment I’m setting up. I wanted to adjust the quality settings of Adobe Flash in a certain desktop pool. I started to edit the settings for the desktop pool and when I clicked finish I got a error that the Virtual Center didn’t had Sysprep running!!!

So I change a settings about the quality for Adobe Flash and suddenly Sysprep is broken?

The suggestion made to resolving this error was to set the customization specification to “none”. Since I used the desktop pool in question for almost 2 days now with the specified customization, I wasn’t about to put that option to “none”.

Things I tried to resolve the problem where:

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A few days ago Edwin and me had some employees from RES software visiting us, giving us a demo of the RES Powerfuse and RES Wisdom products. While both these products introduce interresting features, RES Powerfuse is the one I would like to eleberate on since this product has potential within the virtualisation world.

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When I am troubleshooting I like to have a list of items I can check for either in my head or on paper. Amongst the knowledge base articles of VMware, I found an article about troubleshooting VMs that are having network connection issues.

The article is provides items you can check for when a VM is having connection issues. And with each item they are giving a link to other helpful articles.

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