VMGuru.nl – I choose (a virtual) life!

The last few months we where asked several times to reset a password set on the main account for Dell EqualLogic storage, also known as the grpadmin account.

If you really don’t know the password set on the grpadmin but still have physical access to it you can start a recovery procedure to reset the grpadmin account back to the default password: grpadmin.

Important: Because you must power-cycle one group member as part of the password reset procedure, volumes with data stored on that member will be unavailable and active iSCSI connections to those volumes will be lost until the member is restarted. You may want to warn users of any impending offline volumes and iSCSI disconnections before resetting the password.

To temporarily reset the grpadmin account password to the default factory-set password, follow these steps:

1.) On one group member, connect the appropriate serial cable to serial port 0 (the correct cable will be different on different models of the PS Array) on the active control module. The active control module is indicated by the green control module status LED labeled ACT. The status LEDs are located on the controllers sometimes on the left side or next to the serial port on other controllers.

2.) Turn off power to the member (if you have dual power supplies, turn off both power supplies). Volumes with data located on the member will be offline and iSCSI connections to those volumes will be lost until the member is restarted.

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At the end of May of this year we wrote a article concerning Hypervisor comparisons and we got a lot of positive feedback on it. The downside to that is that people want an update as soon as one of the companies launches a new version of its product, and who can blame them. However the issue is that this takes a lot of research and because of that, a lot of time. And because two of us are ill and in bed wearing a sombrero and the other two are extremely busy, we simply don’t have that time right now.

However, Scott Lowe has written an excellent article on the feature comparison between VMware vSphere 4 and Microsoft’s Hyper-V R2 which is a must read for everybody who’s advising customers on hypervisors.

It’s not as extensive as the Enterprise hypervisor comparison we did earlier but it gives you a good image how both products relate to each other. To extend the picture I added a list of supported operating systems.

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According to buzz in the blogosphere, last July VMware COO Tod Nielsen met with Charles Phillips President of Oracle with regards to the ongoing support issues/questions customers experience when using VMware virtualization technology.

Tod Nielsen providing Oracle with a list of over 500 VMware customers asking for Oracle to support their apps running on VMware. Charles appreciated this but stated that this is a challenges for him as he has not personally received this request from customers, and until he does, cannot see making this a priority for his team. So the bottom line is that Oracle doesn’t feel that many people run critical apps on Oracle in a Virtual environment.

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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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Update April 22th 2009: Today the rumor mentioned below was confirmed during the vSphere 4 launch.

Rumor in the VMware community has it that the next version of VMware ESX, vSphere, has very limited support for the VMware management and automation suite. vSphere will of course be available with vCenter for basic management and automation tasks but the rest of VMware’s great product suite is not supported in the initial release of vSphere.

So there won’t be support for:

• VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager
• VMware vCenter Lab Manager
• VMware vCenter Lifecycle Manager
• VMware vCenter Stage Manager
• VMware View

In my opinion this is a mistake. I understand the pressure is on and VMware should  release a new version fast to challenge the competition. But releasing a product which does not support the majority of your former product suite is not a clever move.

From what I understand this is also a discussion within VMware so let’s hope VMware gets wiser and postpones the release or add support for the VMware Management & Automation suite soon.

I get more and more the question does vendor x with application y support their software running in a VMware environment.

There are several questions to ask:

1. Can the application be virtualized? or in other words does the application run without problems in a VMware environment?
2. Does the vendor support running in a VMware environment?
3. Does the vendor give full and/or unconditional  support when running the application virtual?

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