While I was updating the Determining VMware vCenter and ESX Build Numbers post I thought I would semi-automate the updating of the post with new build numbers for new releases, while working on it I started too fill an excel sheet and ended up with an excel sheet with the following products and build numbers for easy reference:

VMware vSphere 4 Suite (combines several products)
VMware Infrastructure 3 Suite (combines several products)
Cisco Nexus v1000 (1.0)
VMware ESXi (4.0, 3.5, 3.0)
VMware ESX  (4.0, 3.5, 3.0, 2.5, 2.0, 1.5, 1.0)
VMware Server (2.0, 1.0)
VMware vCenter Server (4.0, 2.5, 2.0)
VMware vCenter Converter Standalone (4.0, 3.0)
VMware vCenter Lab Manager (4.0, 3.0, 2.5, 2.4)
VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager (4.0, 1.0)
VMware vCenter Server Heartbeat (5.5)
VMware vCenter Lifecycle Manager (1.0)
VMware vCenter CapacityIQ (1.0)
VMware vCenter AppSpeed (1.0)
VMware vCenter Chargeback (1.0)
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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.

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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…)

Today we got a server from a company the client took over. It was an old server which was used to store scans from a multfunctional printer/scanner. This server needed to be P2V-ed to be used as an archive. The first shock was that it had 2 dongels connected. Luckily these dongels were for the licensing of the multifunctional which we no longer use. Then we found out the old hardware was far from stable, a cold clone resulted in an error indicating hardware trouble. So a collegue swapped all possible hardware in an attempt to create a functioning server which would live just long enough to P2V it. (more…)