Anne Jan Elsinga is a Consultant for Imtech ICT in the Netherlands. He spends his working hours with a lot of virtualization stuff, from feasibility to implementation for server virtualization/consolidation and desktop virtualization. In 2009, 2010 and 2011 he was awarded with the VMware vExpert status. In the night time he dances latin, ballroom and salsa and he also discovered the pleasure of diving.
Virtuazing desktops have their own challenges. Profile management is a hot item for VDI. AppSense is one of the products for profile management. AppSense gives you ‘roaming’ profiles between Windows 7, Windows XP and Windows 2008 for example. I shot a video during a product demo at the Solutions Exchange. See the video to learn what AppSense can do for your VDI environment.
For those who never visited VMworld, after two long days with all kinds of sessions, labs and Solutions Exchange booths VMware organizes a party. These parties are always very big. Imagine from the 6000 visitors a lot of them visit the party. There’s a lot of food, drinks, music, games and other things to keep you busy till deep in the night.
Today is the day that we will all remember. Today will mark the start of a new era. In a couple of hours we will be arriving in Copenhagen, Denmark to give you, our readers, the latest info on virtualization, cloud and cloud related items.
Other than the last couple of years we’re traveling by car, not by plane. A couple of people made fun of us, but that doesn’t hurt us. It is only a 7.5 hour drive (according to Google Maps) without any traffic jams. We hope to arrive somewhere in the early evening in our hotel. (more…)
Tuesday, September 28th, 2010, by Anne Jan Elsinga
There are a lot of products and product features available for creating a (more or less) high available environment. If you look at Microsoft SQL Server you have the option to create a Microsoft Cluster, you can use Marathon everRun, VMware Fault Tolerance if you have a 1 vCPU SQL server, etc.
When I was researching the possibility to create a redundant Microsoft SQL Server environment without the use of shared storage I noticed that a lot of the options needed shared storage: clustering, FT, etc. Some products, like everRun, can be used without shared storage, but are very costly.
An alternative to the options above is Database Mirroring (DBM), which is a part of Microsoft SQL Server. Database Mirroring (DBM) is in essence the possibility to replicate/mirror all database content to a second database server. With DBM you can achieve high availability for your databases without the hassle of Microsoft Clustering Services (MSCS) and without the need for shared storage.
Not all VMware products return their version number nicely. They often come in a long build number. Edwin has done a nice job collecting various build numbers of the VMware products. Now it is possible to view these build numbers online.
We recently received an update about the new stuff that is coming from Dell EqualLogic. Because a lot the information was under NDA so I can’t go into details or give you release dates.
What’s here already?
Last year Dell released the 10GB connections for the PS series. This 10GB connection speeds are mostly done because the marketing asked for it, because the customers asked for it. There are rarely used cases where the 10GB connections make sense but in 95% of all cases it doesn’t give you extra performance.
The bottleneck is often not the connection speed but the spindle speeds limits of the disk themselves. Because of the adaptive load balancing of the PS series the 1GB connections are used very efficiently. When used with the MPIO drivers from Dell EqualLogic you can gain a lot extra performance from the network connections.
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.
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.
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:
Every year VMware is organizing VMworld. It offers attendees informative sessions and hands-on labs, plus access to a wealth of technology partners. The U.S. edition of VMworld takes place in the Moscone Center, San Fransisco from August 30 till September 2nd. The European edition will take place a little over month later from October 12 till October 14 at the Bella Center in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Register now for VMworld 2010 at http://www.vmworld.com/ and save $250 if you register before June 25th for the U.S. edition or before July 23rd for the European edition.
Wednesday, February 24th, 2010, by Anne Jan Elsinga
VMware really wants to get a piece of the desktop market. After acquiring and/or releasing products for desktop management (VMware View and ThinApp)
VMware announced at VMworld ’09 that they had an OEM agreement with RTO for Virtual Profiles. VMware wanted to integrate the product into VMware View, it’s Virtual Desktop Infrastructure product. Now, almost a year later, VMware announced the acquisition of RTO Software.
We’ve been talking about provisioning users, not devices, and the importance of composition or layering in a desktop virtual machine – that a desktop VM is comprised of independent virtualized component parts that are dynamically brought together on demand into an encapsulated VM. One of those critical parts is the user persona, a user’s profile, data files and settings. Clean, efficient user persona virtualization is vital to our vision and that is precisely what RTO’s industry-leading Virtual Profiles will deliver for VMware View. With persona management, end-user specific information such as user data files, settings and application access is separated from the desktop image and centrally stored, enabling increased flexible access, greater portability and seamless file management and backup.
Saturday, February 13th, 2010, by Anne Jan Elsinga
It was Valentine’s Day, February 14th, the day the boys and girls at Partner Exchange exchange business cards with their business partners. They draw hearts and flowers and write funny poems. VMware awoke early and looked over at the stack of cards ready and waiting to be given to friends, including one very special card for Cisco and NetApp, VMware’s best friends.
At the Partner Exchange, VMware was surprised to see that lots of other partners were already there and every desk was piled high with Valentines. VMware went to work right away, hurrying to leave a Valentine at each desk before the bell rang for the keynote.
The Cisco Nexus 1000V is the first switch that can be placed in your vSphere virtual infrastructure, giving back network control back to the people that know the most about networking: The network admins. The Nexus 1000V is built on the distributed vSwitch technology in vSphere and can be managed by the same tools that network admins already use for manging their physical switches.
Cisco is organizing a series of free seminars aimed at sales professionals as well as admins.
Have you ever wondered what the world of work would look like in 2020? I have. With the huge technological progress, it’s hard to imagine what we will be doing and how the world around will look.
If you look at the way we do our jobs today, it seems to be a lot like factory, blue collar labour. It is somewhat cleaner, but the way we do our work today is just like in the early 1900′s in the Ford factory at the treadmill. The industrial revolution made it possible to automate almost everything with machines. Only the parts that could not be automated, were filled by people. Still we treat them as if they are just a mechanical part of a larger machine.
Apple finally annoumced their tablet officially,dubbed the iPad. The last months more and more rumors appeared on the internet. You probably wonder why this is interesting for the virtualization community.
Although a lot of people over at Gizmodo complain that it’s just an iPhone on steroids. I can see some real world applications for it.
Since I’m a real gadgetfreak, together with a lot of you I guess, I wonder how I could use the iPad in the daily operation. I see visions how the daily operation would look like.
This week I got the question if I could draw up a short lists of pro’s and cons for MED-V. Since I’m doing virtualization in the widest possible way, this fits well in my job description.
But heck, what a question! Before I could even try to answer the question I really had to dive into the Microsoft Enterprise Desktop Virtualization solution (hence MED-V) which is part of the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP). Sure, I already seen some comments on the internet about MED-V and I already was somewhat biased. Still I tried to make it an objective report.
Let’s start with what it is not in my opinion. Although it enables management of virtualized desktops it is not a full blown desktop virtualization solution like XenDesktop and VMware View.
Last week Erik encountered a small issue which required him to change the access to almost all volumes on an EqualLogic storage infrastructure.
It was Valentine’s Day, February 14th, the day the boys and girls at Partner Exchange exchange business cards with their business partners. They draw hearts and flowers and write funny poems. VMware awoke early and looked over at the stack of cards ready and waiting to be given to friends, including one very special card for Cisco and NetApp, VMware’s best friends.
At the Partner Exchange, VMware was surprised to see that lots of other partners were already there and every desk was piled high with Valentines. VMware went to work right away, hurrying to leave a Valentine at each desk before the bell rang for the keynote.
The Cisco Nexus 1000V is the first switch that can be placed in your vSphere virtual infrastructure, giving back network control back to the people that know the most about networking: The network admins. The Nexus 1000V is built on the distributed vSwitch technology in vSphere and can be managed by the same tools that network admins already use for manging their physical switches.
Have you ever wondered what the world of work would look like in 2020? I have. With the huge technological progress, it’s hard to imagine what we will be doing and how the world around will look.
