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.

(more…)

You probably noticed the last couple of weeks that everybody is talking about the next generation of virtualisation software from VMware.

In about an hour VMware is going to do a live webcast about vCenter Server.
(more…)

XenServer Enterprise for free?

Anne Jan and I were asked last week ,while doing work at our companies  Headquarters, how we thought about Citrix giving away XenServer Enterprise for free and positions it as “XenServer a complete free Enterprise Virtual Infrastructure solution”. So I asked them what is considered “free” and what are the needs of the customer with a complete data center/enterprise virtual infrastructure?

The question arose because they wanted to know if they made the right choice for a very big company to choose VMware Infrastructure 3.5 Enterprise above  Citrix XenServer.

So looking at what customers answer me when I ask what their requirements are, are for me the best route to go, because customers are the only one who know their organization’s virtualization requirements.

Most given answers I get when I ask for the requirements are:

(more…)

Erik pointed me to an article from Eric Grey (must be the name that makes it good ) on VCritical about using System Center Virtual Machine Manager for the management of your VMware virtual infrastructure.

Although Microsoft is advertising this as one of the good things of the product Eric thinks otherwise. I must admit, I was already biased, but after reading the articles I totally agree with him. I mean, You don’t wanna use a hammer to open bolts or using a screwdriver to change channels on your TV.

Link to the article: http://www.vcritical.com/2009/03/managing-vi3-with-scvmm-considered-harmful

This morning my twitter beeped and showed a message form Eric Sloof. The message read VMware vCenter heartbeat released.Finally VMware released their new product to ensure high availability for the VMware vCenter Server which they presented at VMworld Europe 2009 at the end of February.

vCenter Server Heartbeat is an important addon which creates high availability for vCenter Server. vCenter Server Heartbeat monitors and protects VMware’s management platform against network, hardware, OS or application issues. This fully protects the infrastructure which helps VMware users to deploy critical applications on VMware.

If you want to know more about this read our previous post, download this Powerpoint presentation or go to the VMware site

With the release of ESX 3 and VirtualCenter 2 we got a lot of new features but we lost ‘vmkusage’, a graphical interface which was a great help in solving problems. But today I read the release notes of vCenter 2.5 update 4 and now ‘vmkusage’ is back again! It is not available in the normal installation procedure but it is well worth the hassle.

Check this VMware article to see how to install ‘vmkusage/performance overview’ and mind the three notes at the end of the article.

After the installation you will see a Performance Overview tab, on host, resource pool or VM, which displays a single view of key performance metrics for CPU, memory, disk, and network without navigating through multiple charts. Just like the old days

(more…)

VMware uses the name vSphere for their Virtualisation Infrastructure product also known as ESX. Here in Cannes in the hands on labs I have used the new interface and some of its nifty features. You have to get used to the new interface, but when you are used to it it works nicely and you can find your way around quickly. Did you have to search for some deep hidden options in the VI3 suite, here with the new look and feel around vSphere its almost effortless.

Yesterday I tried out the VMware vCenter Data Recovery Appliance in a hands on lab. It’s a disk-based backup and recovery solution that enables quick, simple and complete data protection for virtual machines. I didn’t have to load an agent on the virtual machines since vCenter Data Recovery has no knowledge of the guest operating system itself. After selecting a LUN as a destination for the backups, I marked some running virtual machines to be back upped.

(more…)

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.

Today at VMWorld Europe 2009 in Cannes VMware introduced their strategy for the coming years.  Chargeback, CapacityIQ, Orchestrator, ConfigControl and self service are a couple of the building blocks that create the foundation for the next level in the virtualization game.

vCenter Chargeback as part of the management vServices. vCenter Chargeback enables automated tracking of costs and chargeback to the business enabling IT to function as a utility with true visibility into operating costs.

(more…)

February 10th I participated in a VMware WebEx on their new vCenter addon, vCenter Server Heartbeat and today the news will be released in Cannes at VMWorld Europe 2009.

vCenter Server Heartbeat is an important addon which creates high availability for vCenter Server. vCenter Server Heartbeat monitors and protects VMware’s management platform against network, hardware, OS or application issues. This fully protects the infrastructure which helps VMware users to deploy critical applications on VMware.

(more…)

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

• (more…)

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.

(more…)

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.

(more…)

Yesterday VMware announced a new vCenter Server add-on, VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat.

As customers expand their use of VMware, maintaining a highly available management infrastructure is quickly becoming a key requirement. So VMware created a high availability solution for vCenter Server.

Today I participated in a VMware WebEx ‘Introducing VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat‘ where more details were uncovered. This information is under strict embargo and I was asked not to publish any detailed information on this subject, which I respect (and others do not ). So check out the news from VMWorld Europe 2009, I think we can tell you more as there is a session called ‘Chosing a Solution for vCenter Server Availability (DC10)‘ 

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?

(more…)

Matthijs Haverink from VirtualFuture.info posted a great article on the ever returning vCenter physical/virtual discussion as Anne Jan has posted on recently.

In his article he describes 4 critical decisions which have to be made:
1. vCenter: physical or virtual
2. SQL database: locally or detached
3. Redundancy options: make it redundant and if so; how?
4. License server: locally or detached

(more…)