Archive for October, 2009

My pal, Lee Dilworth of VMware has put together a quick first look of SRM 4.0 – just quick highly level view of some of the new features. Take a look over at the Uptime Blog page.

http://blogs.vmware.com/uptime/2009/10/a-quick-tour-of-srm-40.html

At last Friday’s Scottish VMUG we were given an inside track on two bits of news from VMware. Firstly, that SRM 4.0 release was coming on Monday (just blogged about that), and that secondly there was to be a re-think on licensing. When vSphere4 was launched customers were informed that the “Enterprise” SKU was to be no more. Customers were given until Dec 15th to upgrade Enterprise+ as sweetner they would be given access to the features such as DvSwitches, 3rd Party PSPs, Host Profiles and 3rd Party switch management (AKA Cisco Nexus 1000v).

Well, in apparent u-turn/listening-to-our-customers – VMware has made it clear that Enterprise will be staying and won’t be discontinued as previously announced. However, the discount surrounding the upgrade date of the 15th remains. Presumably, not to annoy those who jumped when the gun was put to their head…

Well, it’s October 5th – and VMware Site Recovery Manager 4.0 has been released (don’t ask what happened to 2.0/3.0 )

http://www.vmware.com/download/srm/

New features include:

• Full compatibility with vCenter 4.
• Full support for NFS-based arrays.
• Support for shared recovery sites.
  Enables many-to-one pairings of protected sites with a recovery site. For more information, see the technical note Installing, Configuring, and Using Shared Recovery Site Support, which is available at http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/srm_pubs.html.
• Resilience in the face of vCenter unavailability during a test recovery.
  Placeholder virtual machines can be quickly repaired after the protected site vCenter becomes available again.
• New repair-mode installation features.
  You can run the SRM installer in repair mode if you need to change configuration parameters such as vCenter credentials, database connection information or credentials, and certificate details.
• Graphical interface to advanced settings.
  Eliminates most requirements to edit the XML configuration file
• Support for DB2 as an SRM database server.
• New licensing options.
• Improved scalability.
  A single protection group can now include up to 1000 virtual machines.
• Full Compatibility With DPM (Distributed Power Management)
  SRM recovery plans can now power-on or power-off a host that is in standby mode.
• New Option to dr-ip-customizer Utility
  The dr-ip-customizer utility now logs less verbose diagnostic output by default. To force dr-ip-customizer to log the same level of diagnostic output that it produced in earlier releases, use the -verbose option.
• Change in Certificate Validation
  When you select certificate authentication, the SRM installation validates the certificate you supply before continuing. Certificates signed with an MD5 key are no longer allowed.
• Support for Protecting Fault-Tolerant Virtual Machines.
  SRM can now protect virtual machines that have been configured for fault-tolerant operation. When recovered, these virtual machines lose their fault tolerance, and must be manually reconfigured after recovery to restore fault tolerance.
• Improved context-sensitive Help.
• PDF documents available on release media
  Current versions of the PDF documents for this release are available in the docs folder at the root of the SRM 4.0 CD. Updated versions of these documents may be available at http://www.vmware.com/support/pubs/srm_pubs.html.

It was my pleasure to be at the 1st Scottish VMware User Group meeting on Friday. I helped out by stepping in a delivering the “vNews” section and also a quick preso on vStorage Plug-ins from NetApp and EMC. Also at the event were some VMware folks who talked about the upgrade process from Vi3.5 to vSphere4 – additionally we had a chap from EMC talking in detail about EMC’s new development across the board using vStorage APIs and what not.

Anyway, as promised at the event here’s my PPT’s in case anyone wants them…

http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/downloads/vNews-Sept-2009.ppt

http://www.rtfm-ed.co.uk/downloads/VMwarevStorageIntregration.ppt

From Jose Maria Gonzalez (translator of the SRM book for Spanish!)

Te escribo para comunicarte que he publicado un libro,  un libro en el que he estado trabajando durante los últimos dos meses: VMware ESX y VMware VCP Hecho Fácil.

VMware ESX y VMware VCP Hecho Fácil, aborda todas las áreas de la tecnología más importante en VMware ESX y la certificación VCP. Es una revisión muy profunda de los fundamentes básicos de la virtualización y VMware ESX, muy útil para aquellos que comienzan en el mundo de la virtualización y la certificación VCP de VMware, o para los que ya son expertos en VMware ESX y quieren aprobar la certificación VMware VCP con todas las garantías.

He intentado recoger y sintetizar todo lo que necesita saber aquella persona que quiera mejorar y aumentar los conocimientos en VMware ESX, haciendo hincapié en la certificación VMware VCP y aportando muchos consejos ilustrados con cientos de ejemplos.

VMware ESX y VMware VCP Hecho Fácil, ya está disponible online en este link: http://www.lulu.com/content/7549779 y disponible en las estanterías para finales de este mes.

Puedes encontrar más información sobre la noticia en este link:

http://www.josemariagonzalez.es/2009/09/09/vmware-esx-vmware-vcp-hecho-facil-disponible-online/