Archive for February, 2010

According to popular mythology many people mistaken think Al Renouf is French. He is in fact British, and his name probably reflects many centuries of Gallic influence in the United Kingdom. You might know Al by his punning website and twitter handle – virtu-al. When he’s not chasing spiders out of his son’s bedroom – Al’s busy adding more useful scripts to his webpage. Probably his most famous contribution is his “daily report” PowerShell script – that outputs file detailing the kind of handy information a VMware Admin needs. I meet up with Al occasionally at the London VMware User Group when we can…

In this week’s chinway we mainly talk about his project to virtualize Citrix WinFrame/MetaFrame/Presentation/XenApp (pick you name based on your age group…) servers into VMware… we also talk about how the server-based compute model still has a lot of value on virtualized platform, and how VDI still has a long way to go to catch-up with some of the functionality of the server-based computing model…

http://www.virtu-al.net/

Al’s passion is for virtualization and for PowerShell and VMware’s PowerCLI. I frequently bombard the poor guy with requests to figure stuff out for me! I would rate Al up there top bloggers writing about PowerShell and PowerCLI. If you want to follow Al on twitter here’s here:

http://twitter.com/alanrenouf

This weeks chinwag with Al is audio only – we had some troubles with webcams – so it was easier just to go for the audio instead.

If you want the MP3 version of the chinwag it’s here – but to be honest it’s much easier to subscribe to the podcast RSS feed which means the podcast will be download when ever I do them.

Standard Podcast [ 0:01 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Following on from my recent “Chinwag” with Gabrie Van Zanten, this blogpost compares the relative merits of VMware View and Citrix XenDesktop. It raises the issue that a VDI project does offer the tempting possibility of considering other virtualization vendors other than VMware. It also posits the idea that by diversifying your virtual portfolio to be more multi-vendor you might reduce your dependency on a single virtualization vendor, build the virtualization team out of the striaght-jacket of being a VMware-One-Trick-Pony – and although your organization to really play one virtualization vendor of against another from a licensing perspective.

Read more at:

There’s a live Q&A with the Microsoft virtualization team next Tuesday (23rd February) from 4pm to 7pm on Vistaheads. Representatives from Microsoft, including Senior Product Manager for System Center Virtual Machine Manager Edwin Yuen, will be fielding questions and contributing to discussions about the future of the virtualization industry. Topics for discussion will include:

• Security – Are you ensuring that your VM is as secure as your physical machines? How are you managing this?
• Cloud – Is the cloud the future? Is virtualization yesterday’s news?
• Live Migration – has the introduction of Live Migration to Hyper-V made Microsoft competitive?
• Features – What features would you like to see included on Hyper-V? What would provide the most benefit to you and why?
• VDI – What are your experiences of using VDI?
• General – Any other comments or advice for users on using Hyper-V and virtualization platforms

The event will be taking place here: http://www.vistaheads.com/forums/microsoft-virtualization-q-tues-23rd-feb-2010. This even will provide the virtualization community with a chance to engage directly with key decision makers at Microsoft.

Gabrie van Zanten (VCP) has been in the IT industry for 12 years. Currently he is a virtualization architect for a consultancy company and has designed and maintained virtual infrastructures for a number of customers. He has written articles for magazines and frequently publishes in-depth articles at his weblog, GabesVirtualWorld

www.gabesvirtualworld.com

www.twitter.com/gabvirtualworld

In our little chinwag we discussed virtual desktop licensing, during the chat Gabrie drew my attention to potential bug in VMware View licensing – where he mentions a KB article. If you interest you can read more here

http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/?p=1007

If you want the MP3 version of the chinwag it’s here – but to be honest it’s much easier to subscribe to the podcast RSS feed which means the podcast will be download when ever I do them.

Podcast Video [ 0:01 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

In this series of articles, we will be looking at the new generation of VMware vSphere 4 plug-ins that make it increasingly easier to see your storage from the vCenter/vSphere client. In addition, you will learn how the NetApp Rapid Cloning Utility is not just a virtual machine (VM) copying tool, but also allows you to quickly and easily create and mount new data stores without needing access to the storage management tools.

This is a must-read series for VMware admins who maintain and manage their own storage, and for storage admins who want to offload the burden of provisioning new storage to their VMware guys.

Part 1
Part 2

In this second part on my series on SRM, I discuss where SRM might be going in future. Part one is here if you missed it

Command steps/PowerCLI support
In the SRM product, it’s possible to create steps that call-out other scripting engines, such as Microsoft PowerShell and VMware’s PowerCLI. It’s a must-have feature if you want to have a recovery plan that reflects all nuances of your organisation. The trouble with the command step piece, however, is that you can only place them in certain parts of your recovery plan — the main steps. They lack the granularity that allows you at any point to add a call-out to script….

Read on…

I first met Jay Rogers at the Charlotte User Summit (North Carolina) a couple of years ago, and we’ve buddies ever since. He regularly drops me emails which are about real-world VMware Customer experiences. I find these invaluable as I increasingly find myself living in the ratified world of blogging and writing – and have no idea what the real world looks like anymore!

He works for a large health care provider in the USA, where he is there VMware Virtualization Architect, with 10 years experience using VMware ESX in production. He’s have been blogging about virtualization and in particular VMware solutions since 2006. He’s also a VMware Certified Professional(VCP) on VI 2, VI 3, and the new vSphere 4 platforms. Jay’s been with health care sector for 20 years now. He was invited by VMware to be a featured speaker at the first annual NC/SC VMware Summit Event in 2008. He’s also been a speaker at several VMUG events in Charlotte and Greensboro, NC. And also participated in a online Webex Virtualization related event with Acronis in 2008, which exceeded the max capacity of single webex event!

If you want to visit Jay’s blog he’s over here – http://virtual-jay.blogspot.com/

If you want the MP3 version of the chinwag it’s here – but to be honest it’s much easier to subscribe to the podcast RSS feed which means the podcast will be download when ever I do them.

In this episode we discuss Jay’s experiences with IBM Blades and why he’s looking at virtualization IO vendor XSIGO. Additionally, we discuss Jay’s plans for upgrading to vSphere4; the use of thin virtual disks and he’s plans to use VMware Site Recovery Manager. We got so carried away – we wound up chatting for 50 mins. Opps! What I need is a mighty big timer on my desk so I can keep track of time. But Jay had so many great things to share I couldn’t resist asking for more. Those extra minutes at better quality than my previous chinwag certainly leads to a bigger files and longer time to buffer up the thing. So please be patient – I’m not made of bandwidth! This video/podcast thang is new to me, and I did some upfront research beforehand, but like anything you learn more by doing it for real. So I see a blogpost all about how I do this – and the best methods and pitfalls and so on. Anyway, without further delay here’s Jay. Thanks Jay!

There was a couple links discussed on the video/podcast – and Jay’s sent them through for your delectation:

IBM Firmware Whitepaper: http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?uid=psg2MIGR-5079769

Thin Virtual Disk Performance: http://www.vmware.com/pdf/vsp_4_thinprov_perf.pdf

CISCO UCS implementation: Moses Cone Memorial Hospital (Greensboro, NC): http://healthitguy.wordpress.com/

Manage XSIGO 3 real-world scenarios simulator: http://www.xsigo.com/_flash/demo/xsigo_demo_web_01_intro.swf

Podcast Video [ 0:01 ] Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This evening I will be on the VMware Podcast with Steve Chambers (Cisco).

You can listen to us live or subscribe to the podcast series by dropping along to this link. We kick of at 8pm (GMT). That’s about 45mins from now. Sorry about the late notification but I was away from my blog and couldn’t get up there any sooner!

http://www.talkshoe.com/talkshoe/web/talkCast.jsp?masterId=19367

Crisis? What crisis?
I hope VMware will widen the scope of its storage options for its disaster recovery automation product, Site Recovery Manager (SRM), this year. At the moment SRM only works with storage array-based replication from the big storage vendors. So far, purely software-based replication of VMs from the likes of VizionCore and Veeam has been excluded from the SRM project.

Read on…

When I first became involved in virtualisation back in 2003 and 2004, people used to ask me if anyone actually used virtualisation in a product. Most of the time, their plans were to initially restrict its usage to test and development environments and disaster recovery (DR). Quite rightly, I guess, they saw these environments as representing low-risk areas where they could adopt the technology.

Read on…