Noooooo. Not my book! McGraw-Hill aren’t that generous a publisher. Instead I speak of a free NetApp/vSphere book. It currently retails on lulu.com for $15.99 plus shipping. Anyway, over on the Virtual Storage Guy website they have 1,000 copies of the book to give away for free – for the first folks with a US/Canada shipping address.
Here’s a bit of blurb:
Ensure your VMware vSphere on NetApp deployment delivers the highest performance, functionality, and storage efficiencies. This book will cover all basis including ESX/ESXi storage connectivity with FC, iSCSI, FCoE, and NFS; and array configurations including data deduplication and optimal datastore/Virtual Machines layouts. The Second edition highlights new vStorage capabilities and integrations available to VI admins with the NetApp vCenter plug-ins.
The book registers at just under 26,000 words and runs 124 pages and the authors of book are employees of NetApp and Cisco.
If you want a copy you have to head off here – pretty darn quick!
I’ve been having an issue with VMware Tools, since I moved over to vSphere4.1. What happens is this. If you do a typical installation after a clean installation of Windows 7 (and I believe W2K8) then midway through the installation the VM is randomly, and arbitrarily rebooted. Of course in a busy day where you doing far to many different things at once, it’s one that easily missed. So convinced of this that I decide to install a fresh copy of Windows 7 and then snapshotted it before making any changes. I then video’d the entire experience. The reboot happens at around 4min and 40second. You might as well scroll to that point unless you want to watch the most tedious video on YouTube!
Anyway, I took the same VM. Reverted the snapshot, and decided to custom installation of the VMware Tools. This time NOT including the SVGA Driver from the installation routine. Hey, presto VMware Tools installs with an arbitrary reboot. It was thought that vSphere4.1 fixed problems with VMware Tools and this pesky SVGA driver. But that doesn’t appear to be the case. I first picked up on this issue from the rather excellent blog from Jason Boche:
And became concerned about it because of problems it introduce with vSphere4.0 U2 and PCoIP – a little bit later it gave me PanoLogic evaluation some additional funkiness I would rather have lived without.
For my money I think the KB article – http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1011709 which talks about not installing the SVGA driver STILL applies. Watch out for automatic updates and VUM upgrades which might not read VMware KB Articles…
[UPDATE: Sadly, this is the case. And I still have cloning Win7 issues with vSphere4.1]
Anyway, I’m going to be experimenting with my new template (which doesn’t include the SVGA driver) over the next couple of days. And I will soon know if this is related or unrelated…
Incidentally, I thought I might try a clone of a VM without VMware Tools, and was surprised to find that Windows 7 REQUIRES VMware Tools in order to be cloned… It seems to be an issue with the Logical Volume Manager service. So when install VMware Tools, make sure you install it the right way, without a driver which can cause a random reboot!
I’ve been recently doing some video work for VMware/Intel which was brought to my table by friends over at TechTarget on the SearchServerVirtualization.com website. It’s pitched squarely at the SMB market, and those who are new to virtualization and VMware. I think VMware making a big attempt to capture the SMB market, especially with their new “Foundation” SKUs which include VMotion (the live migrate of VMs from one ESX hosts to another…) for the very first time!
There’s 3 videos altogether:
Lesson 1: Rapid Deployment with VMware Virtual Machine Templates
Lesson 2: Protecting your Virtual Machines with VMware HA
Lesson 3: VMware Data Recovery (Backup)
The guys at SearchServerVirtualization.com have put the videos into a kinda of “classroom” style environment which makes it look quite smart!
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