Archive for October, 2008

It gives me great pleasure to announce that my book on VMware Site Recovery Manager 1.0 is now available from lulu.com. You can buy the book by clicking the book cover at the top of the blog or by clicking this link here:

http://www.lulu.com/content/4343147

In case you missed it – I have two free chapters available from the rough “Authors Edition” that was sold in limited copies at this years VMworld 2008:

Install and Configure Lefthand Networks VSA ready for SRM
PowerShell and DR

Currently, I’m the only experienced VMware guy who as written substantially about SRM. In fact there no books available on SRM at all. So I’m really pleased to be the first guy to get there.

Remember by buying the book via LULU.com you will be directly supporting me and the RTFM Education website, which I hope you will agree has been a valuable and useful source of information on all matter regarding VMWare Virtualization.

I order my copy of the book about a week and half ago using “Express Delivery”. That’s from the US where it is printed to Europe. I’m not sure how quick internal US delivery will be. The book is priced in US dollars mainly because I know most of my readership (85% in fact) are from there. With the current exchange rate that works out about £29.99 or about €37. That works out about .10p a page which I think is pretty good value for money. Some might ask why didn’t distribute via PDF. Unfortunately, DRM for PDF is still very expensive, and I’m afraid to say that what’s downloaded as PDF is on BitTorrent tommorow.

As for the long-term future. I will refresh the book when new releases come out – and people who buy the book now will be able to download a “What’s New” style PDF within the 1.x.x release. Once SRM is on version 2.x.x I will release this book for free to download as PDF, or as a paid-for printed book. I want to do this keep up RTFM’s reputation for free resources. It’s taken me 7 months to write this book from starting with the Beta in April, to a finished copy in October. So I think its only fair that I make something out of this venture, don’t you? At least you can be safe in knowing purchase results in the author receiving the full value of his work (the essance of self-publishing) rather than the bookshop or Amazon.com taking their hefty cut.

This is almost shameless (correction IS a shameless) rip-off of stuff from Paul Thurrott, http://www.windowsitpro.com

Microsoft on Monday announced that it had finalized its System Center Virtual Machine Manager (VMM) 2008 product, capping off a year of virtualization-related software releases. VMM 2008 will be made broadly available to customers starting November 1, the software giant noted.

“Our virtualization solutions span the desktop to the data center, including the management tools required to ensure that virtualization remains an asset and doesn’t become an unwieldy burden,” Microsoft Senior Director of Virtualization Strategy Zane Adam wrote in a blog post announcing the release. “Today’s announcement of the [release to manufacturing] of VMM 2008 extends the management benefits of System Center even further by enabling not only the management of Microsoft virtualized environments, but also VMware ESX as well.”

2008 has been a busy year for Microsoft virtualization products. The company shipped its Server 2008 OS in February with a beta version of the Hyper-V virtualization platform, but then shipped that platform in final form later in the year. Microsoft also shipped a standalone (and free) Hyper-V Server 2008 product in October, along with a new version of its Application Virtualization tool for enterprises. VMM 2008 completes the picture, in many ways, providing enterprises with centralized virtual machine (VM) management functionality.

Customers interested in evaluating VMM 2008 can download a 180-day trial version from the Microsoft website.

Some content is drifting out from this years VMworld which is specifically related to VMware’ Site Recovery Manager. I thought I would collate them into one handy post:

Introduction to VMware Site Recovery Manager
http://www.vmware.com/a/webcasts/details/117

VMware Site Recovery Manager: Technical Overview
http://www.vmware.com/a/webcasts/details/116

From VMworld 2007:
BC29 Disaster Recovery Solution Architecture for VMware
BC31 New Trends in Disaster Recovery for VMware

From VMworld 2008:
VMWare Site Recovery Manager & lessons learned from the field (Webcast)
VMWare Site Recovery Manager & lessons learned from the field (PDF)

I didn’t know this but apparently HyperV has an algorithm to generate new MAC address per host, but it doesn’t check to see if this MAC address is unique to two HyperVs on the same subnet!

Robert Larson on virtualizationadmin.com has an interesting article which describes how MAC address pools work in Hyper-V, how it is possible to accidentally deploy hosts with duplicate MAC address pools, how to modify the default pool, how to detect if you are experiencing a duplicate MAC address situation with virtual machines, and how using SCVMM 2008 to manage your Hyper-V hosts can prevent duplicate MAC addresses.

http://www.virtualizationadmin.com/articles-tutorials/microsoft-hyper-v-articles/networking/mac-address-pool-duplication-hyper-v.html

Of course one solution is use a product that doesn’t do this. Hee-hee…

Now this is on vmware.com’s website in the VMware Communities > Beta Community section. It doesn’t appear like its beta programme you have to sign up to – I’m not even logged on to vmware.com and I’m seeing it.

So what is the VC Admin Portal? Its web-based console that provides a central view into the VMware Infrastructure environment across multiple vCenter Server (VirtualCenter) instances.

http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2008/10/vcenter-adminis.html

It will allow for:

• Single sign-on to multiple vCenter Servers
• Monitor events and alarms across multiple vCenter Servers
• Search and track inventory across multiple vCenter Servers
• Launch VI Client in context to manage vCenter Servers
• Search for virtual machines across multiple vCenter Servers
• Launch virtual machine consoles
• Utilizes permissions setup in vCenter Servers
• Unified view for: vCenter Servers, Datacenters, Clusters, Hosts, Virtual Machines
• Access summary view of inventory objects, rolled up across vCenter Servers, for comparison and monitoring purposes

Thanks to Yellow Bricks and VMTN for bringing this to my attention:
http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2008/10/17/vcenter-administrator-portal/
http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2008/10/vcenter-adminis.html  

Hope I didn’t hurt his feelings on that blog post. Perhaps I should start by dropping the Dr Evil tag, unless it has already stuck already. Sorry Richard, I was only pulling your leg! Anyway, VMware’s Richard G has put up a video-blog post of his recent keynote at the European VForum show. In the video Richard explains explaining what VMware is about and what their future developments are:

http://www.run-virtual.com/?p=230  

My friend Miek DiPetrillo has been busy on his blog recently… Here’s a round up of his most interesting posts…

On Preventing Access to the “Download the Vi Client” webpage:
The blog post title speaks for itself!

http://www.mikedipetrillo.com/mikedvirtualization/2008/10/preventing-acce.html  

The KVM vs. Xen Fight Continues:
Is it true that Xen is dead, and KVM is the way forward for people from the Linux/Open-Source Community?

http://www.mikedipetrillo.com/mikedvirtualization/2008/10/the-kvm-vs-xen.html  

56,000 Seat Production Exchange 2007 Deployment:
An interesting case study on virtualizing Exchange. Some interesting experiences on performance. General picture is – you can do it but don’t under spec the VM, and make sure you have enough physical resources to do it. I think we are moving away from the “low-hanging fruit” conservatism of the last couple of years…

http://www.mikedipetrillo.com/mikedvirtualization/2008/10/56000-seat-prod.html

I picked this one up from Chris Wolf’s blog last week. NPIV enabled fibre-channel adapters are ones that can present a WWN to the Virtual Machine. Primarily, this offers greater security when using features like RDMs – not only does the ESX host have to have a valid WWN, so does the VM. Support for this was added in Vi3.5, and you will find the NPIV configuration on the “Options” tab of a VM when you edit it settings. Oh, I should say I’m talking VMware BTW – after all there are other virtualization vendors you could be using (half supresses a snigger). Any Chris is actually flagging up the works of two guys William Lam and Tuan Duong who have developed scripts which offer an easy way to collect a list of all virtual ports (WWNs/WWPNs) in a given ESX cluster. Read more on the blog:

http://www.chriswolf.com/?p=199

Last week I briefly I noticed the David Marshall’s blog about some scenes at the FalconStor stand at this years VMworld. There was  competition to pulled out of the hat to win a Segway. One condition was that you had to be wearing a bright FalconStor t-shirt. Well, it turns out the guy who won had the t-shirt, but wasn’t wearing it. Lucky for him he still won his Segway, unfortunately some of the hard losers the crowd didn’t see it that way.

http://vmblog.com/archive/2008/10/05/vmworld-booth-giveaway-gone-bad.aspx 

Anyway, I met some of the FalconStor people at this years VMworld. I’m interested in their storage and how it works with Site Recovery Manager. This week FalconStor emailed me to say they have another Segway competition on there site – don’t think the T&C’s mention anything about t-shirts this time…

http://www.freeiscsisan.com/en/forms/index.cfm?pn=SegwayEntry&bhcp=1

I spent sometime with David Davis (of happyrouter.com and virtualizationadmin.com) at this year’s VMworld. David has an interesting article about how tricky getting Vista to run on Hyper-V is… any David guides you through the work around – although I see this as interesting indication of how the oft touted “tight intergration” of Windows in VM will be with a Microsoft Hypervisor might not ring as true as you might imagine…

http://www.virtualizationadmin.com/articles-tutorials/microsoft-hyper-v-articles/installation-and-deployment/hyper-v-integration-newer-version-windows-vista.html