Archive for April, 2010

Hi there, and welcome to this months vNews. This was delivered to a live (well, they were at the beginning!) audience at yesterdays – Leeds VMUG. I stated putting vNews online initially for folks who couldn’t make the UG event.  If you don’t know vNews is round up of virtualization news from the last month – and when delivered to a small group – it can be used to stimulate debate. For sure some of the content is pure raw news, but other stuff is contentious enough that it might stimulate discussions. If you want to take the PowerPoints that make up vNews and use them at your own user group – then feel free to download them there here (just remember to mention my name & give credit where credit is due).

In this month’s vNews I cover:

• VMware new independent global VMUG
• VMware Script-o-Mania Contest winners
• VMware discounts vSphere Essentials
• Up and Coming Saleforce.com and VMware joint venture
• Citrix XenApp6, Branch Repeater VPX, Idle Virtual Desktops
• Microsoft Virtual Desktop License changes
• Microsoft enhancements to Hyper-V via SP1 – including RemoteFX and Dynamic Memory
• The Sysprep SID Duplication Myth
• Updates from EMC and NetApp
• Round up of interesting blogs from the sphere…

vNews is also include in my podcast feeds – you can add me to your iTunes here

Below is all the links embedded in the PowerPoint/Video

• Part 1
• Part 2
• Part 3

• Hyper-threading is back
• Memory Reservations
• First Ever TPC Result; New Record

Podcast Video Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

This round of nominations has opened for the coverted vExpert Award. Despite its name vExpert isn’t a purely a technical recognition – you can become a vExpert based on you outstanding contributions to the VMware Community – by your work with the VMUG programme for example. If you think you deserve vExpert or someone you know deserves it then nominate yourself or them today!

http://blogs.vmware.com/vmtn/2010/04/vmware-vexpert-2010-applications-now-open.html

Occasionally, because of a vanity I cannot control – I have look to see how many followers I have on twitter. I’ve often find it odd the term “followers” is used. It kinda makes it feel like twitter is some weird religious cult. The more followers have the bigger your cult of personality. It makes me think of that classic scene in the Life of Brian – well, two actually – firstly, the “He’s not the Messiah, he’s a naughty, naughty boy sketch” – but also the one where they are chasing Brian down the street – and suddenly the cult of the dropped shoe is born. If you haven’t clue what I’m talking about watch this youtube.com. I sympathize with the Spike Mulligan character at the end…

Anyway, I thought it would be interesting to collate various movers and shakers in the virtualization space – and rank them in order of followers. I truth I think much depends on how long you have been twittering on. Well, that’s my excuse for not appearing in the list. For my UK audience – imaging I’m like Smashy N Nicey doing the Top Ten count down on Top of the Pops. To make the “cut” you had to have more than 1,000 followers. That’s right I didn’t make the cut. I was 17 followers short of making my own cut. Incidentally, there are lot of us just underneath this 1,000 followers list. Anyway, this was a VERY UNSCIENTIFIC collection of stats. Surely, there must be a twitter app that skims that data from anyone in your friends list, and dumps to CSV file. Anyway, if I’ve accidentally missed you out – and your in the 1000+ category then let me know – and I will fix the ranking.

What can be learned from such tittle-tattle? Nothing much – except how small and tight the virtual twitter community is – it kind reminds me of the early days of the VMware Forums when folks knew each other by their forum handles….

1. @Beaker – 3971
2. @davidmdavis – 3517
3. @scott_lowe – 2575
4. @jtroyer  – 2442
5. @VMDoug – 1955
6. @DellServerGeek -  1881
7. @stevie_chambers -  1780
8. @jasonboche – 1668
9. @sakacc – 1587
10. @DuncanYB – 1561
11. @gabvirtualworld – 1524
12. @rbramley – 1387
13. @ericsiebert  -  1245
14. @esloof – 1230
15. @Kiwi_Si – 1225
16. @KendrickColeman – 1092
17. @alanrenouf  -  1102
18. @vseanclark  –   1032
19. @rodos – 1024
20. @edsai – 1008
21. @roidude – 1004

This weeks chinwaggee is Doug Hazelman.

Doug Hazelman is the product strategist for Veeam Software. He frequently presents on behalf of Veeam at industry conferences, and shares his expertise via his blog, “VeeamMeUp ” and other social media outlets. Doug advises Veeam customers and partners on best practices and key considerations as they implement and better manage their virtual server infrastructures. I first met Doug at VMworld at one of Veeam’s VIP parties (apparently I’m a VIP!), and amongst the community Doug is a legend for introducing the concept of the “snuggie” to the European vCommunity!

As with the other folks who tend to wind up on the “wag” you can follow Doug via his twitters:

As ever 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 via iTunes which means the podcast will be download when ever I do them. If you don’t use iTunes, here’s the generic RSS Feed link.

In the chinwag I quiz Doug about Veeam’s new “SureBackup” technology which was announced recently and will available in Veeam Backup & Replication v5.0  – we also discuss Veeam’s Microsoft SCOM strategy – and finally we finish up on chatting about where Veeam might be going with DR technologies pitched at the SMB market. I try to keep my comments to minimum. It’s come my attention (actually I’ve known this for sometime!) that I talk to much – so I’ve tried to be more disciplined this time – although I do open my big fat gob quite a bit towards the end. What can I say I’m so opinionated I just never tire of hearing my own voice!

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Here’s one I came up against in the last week and half. I’ve been playing with Win7-64-bit as part of my work on the new View 4.5 beta program. I’m beginning the move away from Windows 2003 Enteprize 32-bit as my standard – and everything I do is going over to Windows 2008 R2 64-bit and Windows 7 – 64-bit. Basically, its good bye to everything 32-bit in my lab environment – and a big hello to needing more disk space and memory.

Anyway, a buddy of mine from EMC ping me an email saying his Guest Customizations weren’t joining the domain for pooled desktops – he was a bit ahead of me. But sure enough when I got there. I had the same problem. I’ve seen this problem in both Windows 2008 R2 and Windows 7. Basically, if you complete the desktop like this – it doesn’t work. The guest gets renamed, and its IP set – but it just doesn’t join the domain.

However, if you complete the dialog in this way – it works just dandy

I have a feeling this an undocumented or obscurely documented version of sysprep… but I’ve not found any source that confirms or denies if this a bug or feature…

Well. So far I’ve got ZERO responses. Perhaps I was much to broad in my request. So he’s a little refinement – how about Stupid Virtualized IT – another words horror stories of people virtualizing and getting it wrong. It can be a mix of both technical and organizational issues – BUT my real interest paradoxically, is the human side of the equation. We have all heard stories of over saturated LUNs or too much/little RAM being allocated to the VM. But what about bonkers stuff – where people only run VM, on one ESX host – because folks are too scared to consolidate…?

VMware’s proud goal is to “simplify IT”, but I’m more interested in “Stupid IT”. Stories which humorous or other wise tells a tale of what happens when IT gets it wrong. My plan is to learn from these various stories – and see if I can see themes and patterns that emerge. The idea is to see whether we can learn from IT horror stories. I’m firm believer in you can learn as much from mistakes as you can successes. I’m beginning my research using various UK Central Government IT projects that have gone pair shaped and I was inspired is the recent BBC Radio4 File-on-Four expose called “Computing calamities” first broadcast on the 2nd March of this year. To be honest I take a perverse pleasure in the worse the story is. The sad thing about the BBC Radio 4 documentary is the waste of public money. Honestly, it begs belief some of the stories couldn’t be made up – even though they have a  Yes, Minister feel to them

Anyway, I would love to hear your “Stupid IT” stories – humorous or calamitous! Given the nature of things, if you post a comment here – its perhaps wise to use a vanilla email and pseudonym. Avoid direct reference to individuals and companies – and keep it vague. I don’t want anyone getting into hot water over this – I will moderate comments closely to make sure this happens.

Come on – spill the beans – tell me your story of Stupid IT…

Here in the United Kingdom it’s election year and very soon our respective politicians will be climbing aboard their battle buses to convince the weary voters to place an X in the respective spot. In a not dissimilar way, a battle bus is touring the U.S., showcasing the latest and greatest virtualization from VMware in the shape of the VMware Express. The VMware Express is a 16-wheeler truck, jam-packed with VMware technologies and showcases VMware’s flagship vSphere and View products.

Read on…

OK. I blogged about this only the other day – but it was a bit of tiny blog – so here’s a second attempt!

The next virtual machine user group event is to be held on Tuesday afternoon, the 13th of April. In response to the interest and support generated by the inaugural event, a larger venue has been selected. The Round Foundry Media Centre can host up to 100 guests, enables multiple concurrent sessions and a vendors trade area.

Register here: http://www.vmug.org.uk/index.php?option=com_seminar&Itemid=5

Learn about:

• Backup

• ESX upgrade 3 to 4

• Storage

• Case study (High availability / Performance MS Exchange or SQL server as VM)

• Case study – VDI

• News from in vm world

• User Virtualisation

http://www.vmug.org.uk/

Editors Note: This is part two of a two-part series on VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM). If you’re just joining us, please take a minute to read part one, which goes over the basics of VMware Site Recovery Manager and what resignaturing is.

In normal day-to-day operations an ESX host in the protected site should not get to see both the original LUN and replicated LUN/snapshot at the same time. If it did, ESX would suppress the second LUN/volume. If an ESX host was allowed to see both LUNs/volumes at the same time, ESX would be very confused and not at all happy. It wouldn’t know which LUN/volume to send its reads and writes to. In ESX 3.5, the host would print a hard console error message, suggesting you may need to do a resignature of the VMFS volume.

Read on…

An important aspect of VMware Site Recovery Manager (SRM) deployment is understanding the concept of VMware Virtual Machine File System (VMFS) resignaturing. Whether you use SRM or choose to do your disaster recovery (DR) manually, VMFS resignaturing is important for all VMware admins to understand. Without a good understanding of VMFS, resignaturing is an important part of what goes on in the background that will remain a mystery to you, and troubleshooting will be tricky.

Read on..