Archive for June, 2010

This weeks chinwag is Steve Bruck. Steve is a regular attendee of the London VMware User Group, and the last time we met up, I managed to corner him our pub (The Pavillion), and teased about when he was going to make a show on my chinwag. Well, after some arm twisting and some vBeers – he finally agreed! Steve is return to a chinwag with a REAL VMware customer using vSphere in the REAL world. I thought it would be nice to balance the usual round of bloggers and vendors I have on the wag.

Steve doesn’t run a blog or tweet – as often too busy doing real work to contribute to the flotsam and jetsom of “social media” that I’m a part of! So I ask him to put together a little bio about himself so folks which would help to explain his background:

“I started in IT way back when the Internet was just fields back in 1989 / 90 working for an NHS Trust IT department. I cut my teeth as a System Administrator for the HR system which was a PICK relational database from McDonnell Douglas ( yes the Airplane guys ). I started poking around the system and started writing some scripts to drag out information from the system that the standard reports seem to neglect. I then moved on to general system admin for all the Hospital’s systems when money was scarce and Windows for Workgroups was the way; then NT 3.51 and finally NT4.0. I dabbled with Unix there and a little bit of VB before moving on to my present employer a National Media company, where I have been for almost 13 years. Through this time I have progressed through System Administrator and Operations roles to my present position as an Infrastructure Architect Team Leader primarily responsible for VMware.

I got involved in VMware seriously around 2007 having pestered management that it “sounds like a good idea” as we were running low on power and rack space in our datacentres. They gave me my head and I’ve run from there. Forcing a Virtualise First mentality and ensuring VMware is taken seriously by the whole company and seen as the infrastructure of choice. Recently I have been playing with PowerCLI and using that to write some scripts to drag out information from the system that the standard reports seem to neglect – Hence Full Circle!”

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

On the chinwag we had about 10 questions to cover, of which we got thru about half. So we chatted about the status of

• Virtualizing vCenter Vs Physicalizing vCenter
• USB support in ESX
• Why would folks buy VMware Workstation/Server if VMware Player now allows you to create VMs
• The thorny issue of VMware Enterprize Plus licensing

Note: Yes, there is a slight crackling noise on this weeks wag, this only became apparent once the recording was over, as it was still audable, I decided to go with it rather than as Steve to go through the whole thing again.

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

Or put a little more accurately. Updating vSphere4 to vSphere 4 Update 2… which also updates VMware Tools… can stop PCoIP connections to fail…

Of course, you not silly and upgrade to a latest version of vSphere4 without waiting for things to shake out – like me for example…

Looking at the KB in question, it sounds as if the Update 2 is OK, so long as you don’t upgrade the VMware Tools. Fortunately, I haven’t done this yet

http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1022830

The chinwag has been offline for a couple of weeks, mainly because I was on holiday in the middle of May. I should have Scott Lowe on the chinwag last week when I was in Finland, teaching the Fast Track course for DNS Arrow – sadly the wifi and Skype were playing up – so we reschedule for yesterday evening. Anyway, the chinwag returns with an extended interview of one of the top bloggers in the virtualization space. You should really know this guy already – given that he’s almost as famous as me! :-p But in case you don’t. Here’s a bit of blurb about Scott which I shamelessly cut and pasted from his weblog. Oh, and Scott recently joined EMC to be part of Chad Sakac’s vSpecialist team AKA “virtual army of warrior geeks”

“I live with my wife, Crystal, and our kids in the greater Raleigh-Durham, NC area. When I’m not working or spending time with my family, I’m working in our church, Kittrell Church of God, as a youth leader.

I’ve been in the Information Technology field for more than 16 years, starting out with desktop support. Along the way, I worked as an instructor, a technical trainer and Microsoft Certified Trainer (MCT), systems administrator, IT manager, systems engineer, consultant, and Chief Technology Officer for a small start-up. Most recently, I was the technical lead for the virtualization practice at ePlus Technology, a national VAR/reseller. Currently, I work for EMC as a VMware-Cisco Solutions Principal, where I specialize in the intersection and integration of VMware, Cisco, and EMC solutions, products, and technologies.

In addition, I am a contributor to SearchVMware.com, a VMware-focused website with technical articles, how-to’s, tips, and news. I have had a few articles published on SearchServerVirtualization.com and I am a former columnist for Virtualization Review magazine.

I currently have two published books on the market. The first, Mastering VMware vSphere 4, was published by Wiley/Sybex around VMworld 2009; the second, VMware vSphere 4 Administration Instant Reference, was published by Wiley/Sybex in December 2009. Both books are available from Amazon.com and other major booksellers.”

I have Scott’s blog on my feed-burner – you can find his blog here – http://blog.scottlowe.org. and I also follow him on twitter too!

Anyway, in the chinwag we discuss Scott recent move to EMC – and we also discuss the top of server consolidation from the “eggs in one basket” scenario – Scott’s also being playing with EMC’s VPLEX technology which allows for amongst many things – long distance VMotion/Live Migrate – finally we discuss the Citrx announcement of the client hypervisor – XenClient.

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

Podcast Video Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Citrix recently announced their work is almost done on the client hypervisor (can you call it a hypervisor if their is a DOM0 or parent partition?). That apparently ruffled some feathers and caused a bit of kerfuffle. [Yes, that really is an Andy & Lou reference] Personally, I wondering what the big deal is all about. Learn more about my skepticism here…

It’s come to my attention that some venerable commentors believe the good ship VMware View 4.5 is trouble, and taking in water. It’s my firm belief that the ship is steady as she goes… Don’t believe me?  Look I know when the GA is but I can’t say because I’m gagged (AKA NDA’d) by VMware! Read on McDuff.

One of the most hotly contested issues debated on my training courses is whether you should or should not virtualize vCenter. Some folks are convinced that it should remain physicalized citing somewhat out-date recommendation to this affect back in VMWorld 2005. Well, there’s nothing like keeping you best practice policies up-to-date is there. As for me I’ve always been strong advocate of virtualizing vCenter – and I often pretend I don’t know how to install Windows to physical box to remind people – that VMware’s management server – benefits from virtualization just like any other workload. However, its not without caveats, not least an interesting feature of vSphere which now makes virtualizing vCenter trickier than it was in previous releases… It does seem to be the case that people have an ideological opinon on this before they have even thought of the technical merits… Read on McDuff

One of the things that always frustrates me about VMware vSphere and its predecessors – is how ungeared up its graphical UI is for so called bulk administrative tasks. I’d goes so far to say its one the single most important things that VMware could improve its in management environment. What do I mean by bulk admin? Well, I mean easy ways of doing the same task to multiple ESX hosts and VMs. Of course, to the rescue comes PowerCLI, but should I really need to learn a scripting language to do these sorts of tasks?

Anyway, I recently wrote an article about bulk admin tasks surround vSphere’s Standard vSwitches as an example. I think I might make this a series of posts so they become a reference for all tasks which are repetitive. Read on MacDuff:

Well, I have been a bizzy bee. Writing lots of content for RTFM big parent website – TechTarget. A couple of months back I was very fortunate to get some free training on Microsoft Hyper-V/SCVMM courtesy of Microsoft. Oh, if only Citrix could be so welcoming and helpful. Never mind. Anyway, I wrote an enormous piece (that’s an article by the way) about the experience of the course, and product. Of course it would have been very easy to be the “arse” in the classroom – and constantly interjected all the time with:

“Microsoft is bad, VMware is better”

I dunno maybe the instructor and the students thought I was an arse for asking all those darn questions! But I did approach both the course and the product with positive attitude, assessing it on its merits rather than with constant unfavorable comparisons which I think is the fear some folks would have. Anyway, the whole thing got chopped up into a series of articles over on TechTarget – and you can read about my exploits there!

I hope you find it fair, balanced and honest…

Why did the VMware instructor take the Hyper-V training course?

Hyper-V Live Migration impresses VMware loyalist

Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008 R2 vs. vCenter

Hey Microsoft, where’s the memory overcommit?

Virtual disk performance and VM snapshot issues in Microsoft Hyper-V

Is initial placement in Hyper-V like Distributed Resource Scheduler?

VMware’s single pane of glass vs. Hyper-V’s management consoles

Critiquing Microsoft’s virtualization strategy

Well, a nice email await for me inbox on Saturday morning. I’ve managed to make it into the vExpert 2010 award program. The award recognises “The VMware vExpert Award is given to individuals who have significantly contributed to the community of VMware users over the past year.”

Anyway, I nominated some people here in the UK, so I’m really hoping they got a nice email.

The benefit of vExpert are pretty limited (although it’s a benefit to have the recognition), personally I’m hoping that this year’s vExpert program will deliver 1-year NFR licenses to those who have enrolled. It seems to be the case that some vExperters struggle to gain access to software and licenses that allows them to continue their contributions. Personally, I’m OK as I’m still a freelance VMware Certified Instructor (VCI) so I get licenses for training every 60-days…

Next week I head off to North Carolina, for their annual user summit in Charlotte. It will be my 3rd year (or is 4th I forget now). I will be doing two panel sessions there with my pals – Scott Lowe, Chad Sakac and Vaughn Stewart…

Anyway, I touch down late Thursdays, and I will scoot over to make the dwinks party that happens the day before the event. The event is itself is Friday, and I believe there is a post-event dwinks party too… On the Saturday I hope to spend sometime with my buddy – Charles Gautreaux. Not quite sure what I’m doing on Saturday evening yet, after all the dwinks I might need to the assume the recovery position. But I thought I might head out to down-town Charlotte and see what delights there to be had on a Saturday. If anyone want to get together tweet me @mike_laverick. Sunday late morning I’m back to the airport, and back to Blighty (That’s the United Kingdom to you folks…