Edwin Weijdema works as an Enterprise Architect at Imtech ICT in the Netherlands. His job is to build bridges between management and the technicians and vice verse. He has many different roles including working as a speaker, trainer, writer, pre-sales consultant, enterprise architect as well as providing risk analysis and responding to concerns and questions posed by his clients. In 2010, 2011 and 2012 VMware awarded him the VMware vExpert award for blogging and community efforts. In his spare time he likes to relax in a good online game with friends.
Snapshot Explorer completes Dell’s Free Utility Toolbox for Virtual Machine Administrators. Detect all snapshots, including orphaned snapshots, to avoid problems with performance and capacity with this 6th utility which got added today! Foglight for Virtualization was formerly know under the name vOPS Server Explorer from vKernel. With the latest tool Snapshot explorer you can eliminate time consuming and tedious need to track snapshots manually.
The complete Foglight for Virtualization Free Edition toolbox contains up to a total of six very helpful utilities which are handy for any Virtualization Administrator around today.
The following tools are in the toolbox:
Snapshot Explorer detects all snapshots, including orphaned snapshots, to avoid Problems with performance and capacity
Environment Explorer provides at-a-glance information about performance, efficiency and capacity
vScope Explorer offers immediate identification of VMs, hosts and data stores suffering performance, capacity and efficiency issues
SearchMyVM Explorer delivers search capabilities, similar to Google, of the virtual environment
Storage Explorer assesses storage performance and capacity across data stores and VMs
Change Explorer lists all changes that occur in a virtual environment, and provides associated risk impact!
While pursuing the 100% virtual mark you once in a while run into trouble with legacy hardware where there is hardware directly attached to the physical server you are going to virtualize. If it is USB equipment you can use USB Anywhere devices to make it happen, but if it is serial port connected equipment it gets harder to tackle that issue.
For instance you want to virtualize a building management system server with reading equipment connected to the serial ports. Is that possible? Yes you can!
It is possible to use a Virtual Serial Port Concentrator, as for instance the Avocent ACS V6000, which is described in this KB article and as mentioned in the vSphere 5 documentation here.
By connecting physical serial ports over the network with a virtual machine you can break the dependency of the physical layer and the OS layer. By solving this puzzle you can protect the organization against legacy hardware failure and/or from software that nobody knows how it is installed anymore.
During a performance optimizing session this week, with a customer, we found some interesting things to boost specific parts of the environment. While playing a high resolution video with clipping where the whole screen turns black and shows a new screen a split second later.
When we started, we saw the video bump and freeze from time to time. Also we experienced ghost lines on the middle of the screen, where the upper part of the screen moved first while the bottom part tried to keep up. We used the Fast & Furious 6 Official Trailer in an 1080p format for testing. The the business news running in an embedded Windows media player on Internet Explorer 9 didn’t perform well either.
The vDesktop is a Windows 7 Enterprise desktop with 2GB memory and 2 vCPU so it can play native 720p videos when necessary as Erik mentioned in his post. We are running the VMware View environment on an Imtech built Flexpod with NetApp storage, Cisco UCS computing power and Cisco Nexus switching for VMware vSphere and VMware View 5.
VMworld 2012 San Francisco is already 5 weeks behind us and VMworld Barcelona is about to start in a couple of days. The US edition was packed with over 20.000 people visiting VMworld. To make sure everyone could follow everything 100% a lot of people have been working a round the clock to make it happen. I had the opportunity to have a glimpse of what was going on behind the scene just after the key note from Steve Herrod. So I witnessed a part of the sound checking for Jon Bon Jovi who was going to perform on the VMworld party on Wednesday. Lights and sound controlled to the max rolled on and off through the main hall, like a roaring lion. I must say it was great fun to watch.
Some fun facts around the General Session only are:
3 days to load in
3 days of show plus 1 Gigantic Party
1 day to load out
8,000′ feet of truss
10 miles of cabling
400′ feet of screens
23 million pixels
30 video projectors
10 Graphics computers
24 channels of Spyder Video processing
4 ME Ross HD video switcher
2 complete sound systems with 750,000 watts of sound going into 164 individual speakers
Recently we had the chance to test a Thecus NAS Server. I had not heard of the name Thecus personally, but the other VMGuru.nl guys knew it.
So I was the best guinea pig to be thrown at it. I had in mind I would test and review a small NAS box, until I saw the box that arrived. The Thecus N8850 dimensions (HxWxD) are 380.4 x 235 x 282.6 (mm) It is very smoothly finished and looks real nice. It was like unwrapping a Ferrari. In my opinion the design is beautifully executed. With a touch panel on the front and a touch power button also on the front. When powering on the Thecus the white leds on the front panel light up behind the vertical row of holes. An OLED menu is displayed on the top screen.
It is an Enterprise NAS in a Tower with 8-bays to fill. On the front there are four indicators for the several LAN connections. During the test I had two available from the on board LAN ports. So you will see LAN1 and LAN2 light up on the photo. Through Linking Aggregation I bundled both 1GbE ports, but more on that later on.
During VMworld I had a nice fast paced interview with Mattias Sundling about why there are so many vGurus in the Netherlands, the future of Clouds, key takeaways from VMworld and IT trends in general.
Today we where handed a VMworld blanket for the lunch picnic. A lot of people including me where tormented to get the blanket in its original shape again. Unfolding is easy, but how to fold it? After being told by another dutch guy what the trick is to get the blanket in its original shape, we decided to do a little instruction cartoon for it. This is how you fold it:
On Monday I had a great meeting with Eric Chiu, founder and president, of HyTrust.
We talked about the power administrators have in a virtual world nowadays. More and more data centers are turned into virtual datacenters (vDC) and are being automated too the max. So basically an organization gives any administrator a gun pointed at the heart of the organization. One person could harm a company BIG time from one pane of glass!
Fortunately we can do something against that now by doing a Secondary Approval like they have in the military to prevent accidental or malicious launch of nuclear weapons by a single individual. Eric continued: “Without proper controls in place, the expansion of virtualization will continue to grow, but we will see, in parallel, security and compliance concerns will increase rapidly.”
The HyTrust Appliance is not a physical piece of hardware. It’s a VMware vSphere compatible virtual appliance that’s deployed right alongside the rest of the virtual infrastructure. It can be deployed on the same hypervisor that it is actively protecting. HyTrust can ensure that certain workloads are only permitted to boot up on specific hosts or specific clusters, which is critical for compliance with PCI-DSS, HIPO or ISO27000/1. Through a partnership with Intel, HyTrust can verify the integrity of the physical hardware of the host to ensure that the underlying platform is fully trusted. Through its unique ability to label virtual objects and then apply policies to those labels, HyTrust Appliance offers flexibility and control that’s unmatched.
VMworld TV made a nice summary about Day 2 with all the highlights on a fast paced day with lots of news flying around. From the Keynote where Paul Maritz handed over the CEO title to Pat Gelsinger, announced the offical ditching of vRAM and unveiled the vCloud suite to an overview of the latest news and a view of the Solutions Exchange. Finalized with a chance to win a 4 bay Drobo device by following VMworldTV on Twiter and/or Facebook.
More and more Microsoft SQL Servers are being deployed virtually in a VMware environment, but how can you license them correctly?
Microsoft changed their licensing again on April 1st, 2012. With the general availability of SQL Server 2012, the changes around SQL licensing are live.
Some highlights are:
There are three main editions now:
Standard
Business Intelligence
Enterprise.
The Web edition is now only available for Service Providers through the SPLA license agreement.
Per CPU licensing is no more. You have two types of licensing only:
Core-Based
Server+CAL licensing.
Microsoft chose this way because virtualization is on its way to 100%, server hardware gets more powerful over time, doubling cores every 18 months. Also companies demand more flexibility with workloads traveling between private and public clouds.
Furthermore Microsoft tries to simplify and make licensing more predictable for customers with evolving infrastructures.
It looks like VMware is preparing a major launch in the next coming days/weeks? Start Believing it yet?
If we look down the path and see what vision VMware spread from the early years this century (2002/2003) up to the point we are today they were spot on.
Looking at the new phrase Believe, Dream Invent, Revolutionize I get warm inside because it gets real close to how the VMGuru crew lives and does their day to day job.
It is reflected in our slogan also, Creativity is inventing, experimenting, growing, taking risks, breaking rules, making mistakes, and having fun, next to the VMGuru logo .
I hope to see what is behind the slogan on VMworld US in San Francisco or maybe we have to wait till the other members of VMGuru.nl go to VMworld Europe in Barcelona.
Snapshot Explorer completes Dell’s Free Utility Toolbox for Virtual Machine Administrators. Detect all snapshots, including orphaned snapshots, to avoid problems with performance and capacity with this 6th utility which got added today! Foglight for Virtualization was formerly know under the name vOPS Server Explorer from vKernel. With the latest tool Snapshot explorer you can eliminate time consuming and tedious need to track snapshots manually.
Some fun facts around the General Session only are:
