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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As every morning I was browsing on the internet and read an amazing article about controlling your virtual infrastructure by logging into vCenter mobile access from your mobile device. I think almost everyone knows the situation in which you are occupied in a personal situation and all of a sudden you receive a call from work. Something is going wrong with your IT infrastructure and they need you to fix it. During the years a lot of remote access programs where made for IT administrators which can help you in a similar situation.

For these situations VMware is working on a program for remote access. The “VMware vCenter Mobile Access” or “vCMA” software makes it possible for an IT administrator to access your ESX infrastructure for remote management.

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Securing your IT infrastructure is always an ongoing process. One of the best practices that VMware encourages is to renew the SSL keys used for communication between VMware products. The renewal of SSL keys periodically, helps to improve data security of your systems.

While reading this I was wondering what is the extended value of having SSL communication inside your own network? The answer is pretty simple, most theft of data comes from people who already have access to your network (Alex just gave me a perfect example this day about a Exchange administrator with rights he should not have).

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Although I wasn’t able to join the VMGuru team to Cannes I can still blog about newly released products from VMware.

One of those newly released products is the 4th update for VMware VirtualCenter 2.5 containing:

• Customization support for Windows 2008 server VM’s
• Performance overview charts which gives the system administrator a overview of CPU, memory, hardisk and network usage in a single chart.

More information can be found here.

While reading some documents from Anne Jan and Erik about migrations of physical machines by means of P2V I noticed there was information about the ports that are being used for this migration:

• Physical machine to the converter server port 443
• Converter server to physical machine ports 445 and 139
• Converter server to vCenter server port 443

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Earlier this week Anne Jan and I migrated a physical server with P2V with Blackberry Entetrprise Server. After the migration we of course asked the client to test all the services and application on that server.

At that time all seemed just fine, but today the client comes running in telling us that the Blackberry service isn’t mailing attachments anymore. Everything else just worked fine.

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After making a P2V of a couple of physical Citrix servers at a client, Anne Jan and I did some tuning for the best performance. Since the servers were on old hardware they now are already faster, but we wanted to get the most out of it. We first removed hardware drivers like Anne Jan’s article mentioned earlier. (more…)

While building the virtual enviroment for a client we are getting a lot of questions about how they should handle certain aspects in their new enviroment.

One of those questions is how they should handle upgrades, best practices etc.

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While working on a VMware implementation at a client site, we came upon a problem when we wanted to start HA for the ESX cluster. The notification we received was “Unable to aquire licenses because license source is unavailable”. The notification in itself is clear enough, but we did configure the license server and the ESX servers reported to the License server before. So what then could be wrong?

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VMware is working hard on the view people have on virtualization. The recently made the following article available, wich covers the deployment of Exchange 2007 on a VMware infrastructure.

VMware starts the article with the description of an “old” Exchange 2003 enviroment. From that point they take you through the necessary planning and consideration steps needed to get that “old” enviroment into a new Exchange 2007 with VMware infrastructure.

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Yesterday AJ and me have been attending a seminar from Sun Microsystems about the Sunray. The Sunray is the next step in moving more processes into the backend and less hardware at the frontend.

After a little introduction of the Sunray, Sible Schöne of the Climate bureau was given the word. He told a long, but very interesting story about the climate changes on earth. In the end he basicly told us that in order to bring down power consumption the Sunray would be a great first step to do so. The Sunray in itself only uses 4W and there are options to have the Sunray draw its power from power-over-ethernet. (more…)

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.

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…)