During the last few years we published several Enterprise Hypervisor comparisons and we got very positive comments and feedback on it. With the release of vSphere 5, XenServer 6 and a service pack for Hyper-V it was time for an update.

It very interesting to see how some of the products have improved over the years and how the three major manufacturers look at each other and copy features. But you can’t trust all manufacturers by just a simple green checkbox. Some claimed features need third party add-ons, aren’t suitable for production workloads or are only supported on a limited set of operating systems. You have to investigate further and I hope I’ve done most of that work for you with this new enterprise hypervisor comparison.

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Today at VMworld Europe 2011 Partner day, VMware released a new version of their vSphere client for the iPad. Just in time for the real start of VMworld Europe 2011 in Copenhagen.

New in version 1.2 of the vSphere client for the iPad is:

• vMotion. The feature is available via Host & VM action menus. Virtual machines can also be two-finger flicked/dragged from the Host detail view to enter vMotion mode;
• Ability to email vMotion validation error details to others;
• View task progress reporting on VM cards;
• Ability to refresh vCenter host list;
• Support for ESX 3.5;
• Support for VMware vSphere 5.0.

Of course the vSphere client for iPad requires iOS 4.0 and vCMA, also version 1.2 in this case.

Last Thursday we attended the VMware vSphere 4.1, vCenter 4.1 and View 4.5 launch event at Amerongen (NL).

We already brought you all news regarding vSphere and vCenter 4.1 and View 4.5 but we heard some interesting thing we would like to share with you.

VMware View 4.5

With VMware View 4.5 VMware has changed the names for some product related features. Let us welcome Local mode, persistent disk, dedicated and floating pools.

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Last year we published an Enterprise Hypervisor comparison and we got very positive comments and feedback on it.

During the last few weeks I received many update requests so I decided to update the old hypervisor comparison but this time I changed the setup a bit.

Changes:

• No beta or pre-release versions are used. In the last document we also compared Hyper-V R2 beta which wasn’t officially released.
  This time all software is available and no features are subject to change due to beta-test, etc.;
• The versions used are the platinum/ultimate/fully-featured versions of the hypervisors. Product features can be limited by lower license versions;
• No free versions have been used in this comparison.

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There was an issue discovered earlier today that prevents View Composer from working with vSphere 4.1.

VMware apologizes for any inconvenience this may have caused you. If you know how to spread the word to your friends and colleagues, please do so.

With yesterdays release of vSphere 4.1 comes the challenge to upgrade your existing installation to this new version. Because I have been testing the beta for a while now, I couldn´t wait to try it in our new testing environment.

However, there are a few caveats:

• VMware released a KB article with the supported upgrade methods for ESX(i) 3.0.x, 3.5 and 4 full, embedded or installable;
• Do NOT upgrade vCenter server to version 4.1 if you are using VMware View Composer 2.0.x. Check out this VMware KB article for more information.

Before you start the upgrade process, back-up the vCenter- and Update Manager databases.

After downloading the needed ISO´s, I started with the upgrade of the vCenter server.

But first of all, I had to uninstall all incompatible vCenter components, in this case Guided Consolidation 4.0.

When this is done, it´s time to update the vCenter server.

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A few minutes ago VMware has released the new version of VMware vSphere, version 4.1.

This new vSphere version contains 150 new features and has improved scalability, memory management, DRS, etc.

Besides all the new features the greatest news is that vSphere 4.1 is the last version which will have an ESX version (with service console). As of the next version there will only be two versions, ESXi embedded and installable.

Below you will find a detailed list of features that are include with the vSphere 4.1 release:

• Scalable vMotion;
• Wide VM NUMA;
• Storage I/O can be shaped by I/O shares and limits through the new Storage I/O Control quality of service (QoS) feature;
• Network I/O can be partitioned through a new QoS engine that distinguish between virtual machines, vMotion, Fault Tolerance (FT) and IP storage traffic;
• Memory compression will allow to compress RAM pages instead of swapping on disk, improving virtual machines performance;
• Distributed Resource Scheduling (DRS) now can follow affinity rules defining a subset of hosts where a virtual machine can be placed;
• Virtual sockets can now have multiple virtual CPUs. Each virtual CPU will appear as a single core in the guest operating system;
• Support vCenter on 64 bit operating systems only;

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During the last month I have been very busy building a new infrastructure at a client site. I’m responsible for the overall technical solution and the basis, a VMware vSphere infrastructure build on five Dell PowerEdge R805′s, Dell EqualLogic PS5000 and 6000 storage and Cisco switches for LAN, DMZ and IP storage networking.

Just before the customer initiated their functional test period we discovered that the overall Windows network  performance was slow. We did several test like copying an 8 GB file from local vmdk to local vmdk and VM to VM and found that the storage performance was no issue but the network performance was very slow.

In the last few years that I have been working with virtualization I have always been a fan of a static network configuration. Meaning, when I configure ESX networking I like my network interfaces and physical switch ports to be configured at 1000MB full duplex if the switch/network interface combination allows it. The idea is that if you purchase gigabit network interfaces and switches you know the maximum speeds. So you configure it to run at it’s maximum capacity, eliminating overhead and using as much bandwidth as possible purely for data transfer.

So when we experienced slow network performance I had a colleague check the Cisco LAN switches for errors, drops, packet loss or any other flaw which might indicate a speed or duplex mismatch. None were found so I assumed that the network configuration was not the issue. But as we know by now, ‘Assumption is the mother of all fuck-ups!‘.

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May 21th VMware released their new flagship product VMware vSphere 4 which should bring us tons of new features and performance improvements.

But how is the vSphere experience almost 9 months later?

Starting with the installation and setup experience, my personal experience with vSphere is very good. During the installation and setup of VMware ESX or ESXi 3.x I experienced a lot of issues like BIOS settings causing HA issues, HA issues when changing the ESX IP addresses, Problems with VMware Update Manager and faulty HP USB sticks. We even created a HA checklist for you to easily address HA issues.

Once up and running ESX(i) 3.x ran fine with the occasional HA error which 99% of the time could be fixed by reconfiguring HA from Virtual Center.

Now with vSphere the installation and setup is simple, error free and straight forward. Setup HA in the cluster properties wait for all progress indicators to reach 100% and you’re done.

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Based on the real life results when virtualizing XenApp I thought it was about time to summarize some of the best practices for virtualizing XenApp servers.

Why we DO want to virtualize XenApp?

1. For server consolidation:  vSphere enables scale up XenApp deployments;
2. For mixing server editions: 32-bit and 64-bit XenApp VMs can coexist;
3. For management: Better management through flexibility & isolation think about Change Management and VMware DRS;
4. For high availability and disaster recovery: VMware HA and vCenter Site Recovery Manager;
5. For less costs for server hardware, maintenance contracts, power, cooling, floor and rackspace.

Virtualizing XenApp servers is very complex. There are a lot more layers involved, like the type of hardware, the capabilities of the processor, the performance of the shared storage, the hypervisor used, the specific settings per hypervisor, operating system settings in a virtual environment, the XenApp settings in a virtual environment, the Workspace management settings in a virtual environment etc, etc.

In the following sections I tried to summarize some of the best practices we use in our projects:

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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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On a regular basis we have info sessions with our most important vendors.  Last week we had a session with HP to tell us more about virtualization in their hardware products. The session was especially targeted at Flex-10. Flex-10 is the way how HP breaks s a 2 x 10Gb Ethernet pipe into a flexible, easy to change, smaller Ethernet ports.

Why is this so important for us virtual friends? Of course it is a huge cost saver not only in hardware but also in management of the environment but the most important thing is that it opens up a lot of new virtual design opportunities.

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One of the coolest things is that we now can make a design for up to 4 blade chassis with each physical 16 server blades and let’s say 320 virtual servers where all the traffic between the servers never leaves the blade chassis. It is all handled with the blade chassis. Also all of the vSphere traffic like VMotion and service console can be handled within the chassis at 10Gb speeds.

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Last night VMware has released Update 1 for ESXi 4, ESX 4, and vCenter server 4.

According to the release notes Update 1 includes the following improvements:

• Support for Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2;
• Support for View 4;
• Support for 160 VMs per host in a HA cluster with 8 hosts or less;
• Increased vCPUs per core limit from 20 to 25;
• Paravirtualized SCSI support has been extended to Windows 2003 and 2008 boot drives;
• vDS performance improvements;
• Support for DB2 database;
• Improved support for Microsoft Clustering.

Besides this vCenter server now includes a pre-upgrade checker tool which enables you to proactively check ESX hosts for any potential issues that you might encounter while upgrading vCenter agents on these hosts as part of the vCenter Server upgrade process. You can run this tool independently prior to upgrading an existing vCenter Server instance. The tool can help identify any configuration, networking, disk space or other ESX host-related issues that could prevent ESX hosts from being managed by vCenter Server after a successful vCenter Server upgrade.

The release note can be found here.

vSphere 4 Update 1 can be downloaded here.

I’m in IT for more then 12 years and during that period I learned, never to trust something another professional tells you. So as I am studying for my VCP410 exam, coming Friday, I came across the Virtual Machine configuration maximums. I saw the info at Simon Long’s blog, took his VCP vSphere 4 Practice Exam and also took notes.

When running through all configuration maximums I remembered the ‘never trust anyone‘ motto and as I’m in between project I thought it would be cool to check/confirm the presented maximums. Some seem so ridiculous that you can hardly believe them to be true.

After 10 minutes of editing the virtual machine configuration I got my ‘MAXVM‘ and I must say VMware delivers one awesome virtual machine. I can’t imagine anyone using a virtual machine which approaches these configuration maximums.

To sum it up:

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On the site www.vReference.com I came across a post announcing the “vSphere 4 reference card”. Wondering what this was I started reading the post.

It seems that Forbes Guthrie made a document containing hard limits for the vSphere 4 products. I found the list of items very wide and should come in handy when looking for limits of the vSphere 4 products.

The reference card is refreshed every now and then, so check out the site periodically. Or subscribe to the RSS feed of the site.

Hopefully this card can help you as future reference. I found it to be very helpful.

May 21th VMware released their new flagship product VMware vSphere 4.

With a new product comes a new set of courses, we (VMGuru.nl-crew) already attended the ‘What’s new in VMware vSphere 4‘ course given by Eric Sloof. And there’s also a new ‘VMware vSphere, Install & configure‘ course.

I now regularly get the question ‘The courses are nice but how do I become VCP on vSphere 4?‘

There are four different scenarios. Check this article on NTPro.nl to find out how you can become a VCP on vSphere 4.

The exam to upgrade your VCP to vSphere 4 (VCP4) will be available on August 1st.

If you are a VCP on VI3 and you have attended the beta program there is a chance to upgrade your certification long before August 1st by taking the beta exam. This exam will be available from June 29th but is not publicly available, candidates eligible for the beta exam will automatically be contacted by VMware and must be VCP3 certified and beta product users.

If you want to know more about the VCP on vSphere 4 exam, the blueprints can be found here.

Personally I would like to take the beta exam but Eric Sloof alerted me to a caveat in this scenario. To become a VMware Certified Instructor you will have to score 85% or more. If you take the beta exam the chance is greater you won’t make a score of 85% and you won’t be able to becme VCI. He also mentioned that it is difficult to re-take the exam to boost your score.

So I’m not sure yet. Become on of the first VCPs on vSphere 4 or have the opportunity to become a VCI? Dilemma!

I think I would like to be one of the first so I will be waiting for VMware’s invitation ……….

Last night I received an e-mail from Cisco thanking me for my work in the Nexus 1000V beta program and announcing the availability of the final product.

For those of you that don’t know the Cisco Nexus 1000V, it is a pure software implementation of a Cisco Nexus switch which can be used in vSphere 4. It resides on a server and integrates with the hypervisor to deliver VN-Link virtual machine-aware network services.

We are now 3 days from the day we, VMware enthusiasts, have all been waiting for. The general availability of vSphere 4! According to the information that VMware has published officially goes on sale on Thursday May 21st.

As VMware Premier Partner we received numerous e-mails from VMware with fact sheets, specifications and presentations on ‘What’s new in VMware vSphere 4‘, we even attended the ‘What’s new in VMware vSphere 4‘ course by Eric Sloof a few weeks ago. But so far customers have not been calling or e-mailing me to find out what’s new, were and when to purchase it. Don’t get me wrong, I thinks it’s a great new product with many new interesting features and improvements but our customers are not very interested yet.

I don’t now if this is because of the hypervisor battle going on, the economic situation, their great experience with ESX 3.5 or the release date close to the holiday season?

I’m curious to know what your thoughts are on this issue and if you are experiencing the same situation?

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Today we attended the new ‘What’s new in VMware vSphere‘ 4 training and who better to get us up-to-date than Eric Sloof from NTPro.nl.

Eric already caught us on camera this morning while we were doing the labs so we thought we should return the favor .

Watch Eric Sloof share his thoughts on the first day of the training.

For those of you who have been following the launch of VMware’s new flagship vSphere 4 and are anxious to upgrade their virtual infrastructure, I ran into a great post on Mike DiPetrillo’s website.

Mike has posted four great video’s with the following scenario’s:

• Video 1 -VMware VirtualCenter Management Components
• Video 2 – VMware ESX Host Migration Methods
• Video 3 – Virtual Machine Upgrades (VMware Tools and Virtual Hardware)
• Video 4 – Implementing VMware vSphere Licensing

Interested? You can check out the videos here.