Archive for December, 2008

My pal, Richard Garsthagen and Lee Dilworth – have put together a funky video about SRM for those who are unfamiliar with it. I’ve been down to Frimley (VMware’s location in UK) and spent sometime with Lee. He was really helpful in answering my questions. 

http://www.run-virtual.com/?p=247

I saw this XL calculator a couple of weeks ago, and its finally public. It’s an estimator for the DB size of the SRM system…

I don’t want to hard-c0de a link to the XLS file itself – in case it name or location changes. Search for the text “VMware vCenter Site Recovery Manager Sizing Estimator for SQL Server” on the Tools page of the SRM resource location…

http://www.vmware.com/products/srm/resource.html

I notice Scott Lowe had an interesting post on some of the requirements for NetApp and SRM to work together…

http://blog.scottlowe.org/2008/12/11/3183-vmware-srm-on-netapp-storage/

Just recieved my email to download Veeams early Xmas present to the VMware Community. It’s called Veeam Monitor, and does real time monitoring of Vi3. I’m currently running Vi4 on my lab kit at the moment – so once I’ve download it I will give it a try against Vi4. Nothing venture nothing gained, huh?

Those very nice people at Veeam have Xmas present just for you. Like all good presents you won’t be able to open it up until that very special day! If you have downloaded and used Veeam’s very popular FastSCP Utility you will know they have reputation for giving away juice tools for nuthin’. And they say there’s no such thang as free lunch?

Just in time for the holidays, VMware pro’s can visit http://www.veeam.com/xmas/default.html  and register to be among the first to receive Veeam’s newest free tool to help manage VMware. They will be unveiling what the new free tool is on Dec. 22 – everyone who registers will automatically receive a download link that day via e-mail.  This holiday gift is marked “do not open until Dec. 22.”  :-)

Have you been a good boy this year?

Mac Virtualization is not something I really know that much about. Although this year when it came to buying a new laptop I did pause for a moment to consider getting a Mac with VMware Fusion. Now I wish I had, instead I got HP Laptop with Vista!

Anyway, the register has a blog post about VMware Fusion’s competitor Parallels – and how its doing something that VMware can’t do…

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/06/18/parallels_mac_server_intel_virtualization/

What’s weird about this is the very same Register, that royally slagged of parallels in two previous blog posts and noted how some Parallels customers want their money back for a bodged up grade. 

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/25/parallels_desktop4_prerelease_sw/

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/24/parallels_four_users_angry/

Come on Register – you can’t have it both ways in the space of week! There’s little point in touting the advanced features a product, that doesn’t work very well!

OK, I have a rather purile sense of humour but this made me snigger. It’s all about certain ISP providers blocking offence words in email addresses, even if your name is entirely innocent. 

http://www.pcworld.com/article/155067/dr_libshitz_cant_get_an_email_address.html

For sometime RTFM has had two domains and name spaces – the core rtfm-ed.co.uk, and the rtfm-ed.eu site. There rtfm-ed.eu was a location where I stored large files cheaply, on the more costly bandwidth restricted rtfm-ed.co.uk domain. This situation has now changed, and the rtfm-ed.eu will shortly change.

Please change your bookmarks accordingly. Any links only need a couple of characters from www.rtfm-ed.eu to www.rtfm-ed.co.uk. For a while google will point to links which are dead, but the files have merely been transferred to the core site.

During the switch from the old to the new site. I lost a post about Hyper9. The guys there have a beta progamme – and RTFM has some been some allocated some slots for people to enter the Hyper9 beta program.

Hyper9 does have a few prerequisites or requirements for potential beta participants:

• Must be using VMware ESX 3.0 or higher and VirtualCenter 2.0 or higher
• Must have at least 2 VMware ESX servers
• Must have at least 20 virtual machines (VMs)

In addition, if selected, program participants must agree to install the software within 5 days of receiving it. Once installation is complete, users will need to notify Hyper9 at an e-mail address to be provided to them. Leave your details by adding a comment to this post….

Last week VMware released an update to their Site Recovery Manager product. In the main this is maintenance release, but it does introduce new additional feature and improved support. So now SRM 1.0 U1 is compatiable with the very latest version of Vi3.5 U3.

SRM U1 introduces for me two new important features. Firstly, we can now seperate the right to TEST a recovery plan, from the right to RUN a recovery plan. This means we can make sure higher privileges are required to actually trigger the DR plan for real.  

Secondly, we no longer need to use the “Guest Customization” method to change an IP address – SRM U1 introduces a bulk or batch method of changing IP addresses at the VMs at the Recovery Site. The new method uses a .CSV file to hold the IP modification data.

Improved support includes support for the RDM feature (which should have really been there from day one!)

Anyway, currently my kit is dedicated to running the next release of Virtual Infrastructure as I work on the Vi4 book. But in the new year I will be wiping that configuration down to spend sometime documenting these new features to write a PDF “What’s New” guide to SRM 1.0 U1 to make sure the SRM Book is updated. At some stage I will be going back to the original book, to intergrate this “What’s New” guide to SRM. Then it will be back to the grindstone for the vi4book!