Archive for February, 2009

Something we have known for a while – VMware have a Linux version of vCenter – which is available for technology preview download – but NOT support production…

http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2009/02/23/vmware-vcenter-on-linux-technology-preview/

So… the next question is – when will vCenter be downloadable is a virtual appliance, AND when will it be free as a management platform only – but requiring a license for “advanced” features like VMotion/DRS/HA/FT and so on…

Well, I’ve (finally) arrived in Canne – and given I live in Europe (allegedly) it was a bit of nightmare of journey – caused by ****-up on my behalf by booking a flight that required me to switch from Paris-Charles-de-Gaul to Orly by bus. Well, it was all downhill after that – the use of the word “bus” gives a way. It’s hard to think of the last time I had such a crap journey. Unless I shudder and remember a flight back from Athens to London, Heathrow. It was about 3.5hr flight from Greece to the UK… and then a further 2.5 wait for a bloody bags to arrive off the carousel. You see there’s only one thing worse than arriving in France on a plane, and that’s arriving at Heathrow…. Anyway, the delights of modern travel are outlined in this video diary of my journey…

VMworld Europe - 2009: Episode1: Journey to Canne Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (3)

This is a message to all my blogger pals out there. I’m getting increasing tired of the way these big corporate types spout their FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) about their competitors in an effort to promote their warez using their own “corporate blogs”. From here on in we the blogging community declare:

1. We will ignore all corporate blogs – as they represent the attempt to flood the bloggersphere with marketing guff dressed up as technical information.

2. By linking or referring to them – we merely perpetuate this marketing guff to the the communities we serve.

3. We will not post, cut-and-paste or link to what amounts to press releases in disguise. By these bogus blogs these organizations try to use the bloggersphere as part of their own incipent viral marketing campaigns. IF companies want advertising they pay for it – not by trying to get bloggers to do it for free.

Well, as promised here’s some free chapters from the book I wrote with Ron Oglesby and Scott Herold. Each download button is chapter – Chapter1 and 2 from Advanced Design Guide and Chapter 1 and 2 from the Operations Guide

Chapter 1: Design Guide

Chapter 2: Design Guide

Chapter 1: Operations Guide

Chapter 2: Operations Guide

If you have been using VMware SRM for a while you might know that U1 introduced a new “bulk” method of changing IP addresses. Previously, SRM rather clunkily used per-VM “Guest Customization Specifics” to re-IP the DR based VM. The new method uses a specifically formated CSV file to “import” the new IP definitions. However, be careful. The DR-IP tool has specific requirements for certain fields to completed for it to work without error. This was first brought to my attention on the VMware SRM forum. Here’s the original post which explains all – apparently it was all in the Release Notes after all.

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1166449

This blog post about the value of SRM caught my eye. People often want to know why they would want SRM and how to construct cost-savings-to-the-business for aquiring it. The new “Uptime” blog from VMware has the usual arguments – but critically how long it would do manually, what SRM does automatically…

http://blogs.vmware.com/uptime/2009/02/failback-absolutely-absolutely-absolutely.html

[Hey, whatever happened to the used-carsalesman joke] That’s another story… Chad@vmware and Vaughn@netapp have teamed up together to discuss iSCSI throughput improvements. How about running the MS iSCSI stack in a Windows VM? I’ve heard stories of it out performing the VMkernel iSCSI stack:

http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2009/01/high-throughput-iscsi-with-vmware-multivendor.html

Another lift from the VMware KB system:

“An attempt to VMotion a virtual machine to another ESX host results in a message indicating the hosts are incompatible. The source and destination hosts both contain Intel 45nm Core 2 (Harpertown) processors, but are different CPU revisions (steppings). Known to affect Intel Xeon 5460 CPUs.”

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1008315

This is a life directly from a KB article:

http://kb.vmware.com/selfservice/microsites/search.do?language=en_US&cmd=displayKC&externalId=1008426

“To migrate an SRM server to a new host, you must install SRM on the new host and supply database connection information used by the old installation. The new host must have access to the same array management systems as the old host, and the protected inventory should remain unchanged during the migraiton. “