Archive for the ‘ESX’ Category

Today I want to start a campaign within the VMware Community…

I would like to see VMware re-instate the “VMTN Subscription”. You might ask, what the hell is that? That would be fair enough because it was withdrawn many years ago, and never re-instated by VMware.

The VMTN Subscription (I found this link on Google which is still active posted in 2005) was similar to Microsoft MSDN or TechNet – where for relatively small yearly fee you could download the core enterprise software and run it for 1year. Right now there is whole legion of home-labbers out there that have to make do and mend with evaluations that expire after 60-days. Sadly, the VMTN Subscription program was cancelled in 2007 and never re-instated.

Now as former VMware Certified Instructor and vExpert – if I wanted NFR style licenses I can get to them. Although I would have to say throughout all my time working with VMware its been also been a struggle gaining access to software and licenses – as independent guy not affiliated to partner…. That’s mainly because an evaluation download doesn’t always give me access to ALL the software I need to do my kind of work. It’s often been a frustration, and I’ve often need to call upon my personal network to get hold of bits that seemed impossible to get through legitimate means. My concern is not so much for myself as I’m generally a well-connected dude – but for the many thousands of loyal VMware supports in their homelabs. VMware has one of the best user communities on the planet. I personally believe that without the “bottom up” support of thousands of enthusiasts who teach themselves VMware in their home labs, who then go on to recommend software to the customers, clients and businesses – VMware wouldn’t be as half as successful as it is without this legion of unpaid evangelist for their cause.

So, VMware. Bring back the VMTN Subscription or make it part of the VMUG Advantage package.

If you want to register your thoughts/views/opinions for this idea – add your +1 to this forum post here.

Well, at last the wait is over. vSphere5 is now available to download and evaluate from VMware.com website. I was actually expecting the bits to drop on Wednesday, that’s what my (no so) reliable sources were telling me. Who knows perhaps they were released at 23.59 on Wednesday!

I wouldn’t know – I was tucked up in bed by 10pm. I’m not one of those people who sleep in a tent outside an Apple store, if you catch my drift.

Of course I went to download vSphere5 I wasn’t able to. You see I’m neither a customer or partner, and therefore my account is NOT “activated” for customer downloads.

That’s a webpage I’ve been looking at for some years. So at the moment I’m downloading the eval, which looks ALMOST fully functional (Update: I’m not seeing the “Depot” version of ESX5i that’s used with Auto Deploy…). That will last for 60 days. After that I don’t really know what I will do. I will probably sign up for a mailinator account, and just keep on evaluating vSphere5. I’m not really sure where I’m heading on licensing with VMware. I’m no longer a VMware Certified Instructor so I’m not on the email list for education licenses, and I don’t know how long it will take for my vExpert licenses to come through.

My task for today once ESX5i installable has downloaded is to test the GA build of the VMware Hypervisor against the Ultimate Deployment Appliance. Yes, that’s right the UDA has a new build number (Build 20) which adds support for ESX5i. But I need to validate it against the GA, before Carl and I make it publicly available. Not that I expect anyone to deploying ESX5i in anger today – except hard-core fanbios like me of course!

The other thing I’m trying to do is get a preview of chapter 1/2 of my “Hotel California” book out on RTFM. Why? Well, chapter 2 has lots of vSphere5 good stuff, and don’t want to sit on it until next year – because well, by then it will be common knowledge….

I’m sorry, I just had to rip off the same title of an article I wrote for TechTarget recently. Like my pun? I was inspired by twitter storm as folks tried to think of film titles where they could work in some aspect of cloud or virtualization. My topic is about how the various OEMs are aligning themselves to sell you the entire hardware stack – servers, storage, switches – it’s like all the OEMs suddenly want to be like IBM. Whether or not this approach will take hold or a more flexible pick-and-mix of vendors based on an agreed reference architecture will win out, or the “one-throat-to-choke” argument will win out is anyone’s guess. Perhaps the best measure of which stack beat another is how long it takes from start to finish to get a VM created on fully-feature vSphere deployment would be the best measure…

Read on…

Please join VMware executives Paul Maritz, CEO and Steve Herrod, CTO for the unveiling of the next major step forward in Cloud infrastructure.  Paul & Steve’s 45 minute live webcast will be followed by additional online sessions where you can learn more about the industry’s most trusted virtualization and cloud infrastructure products and services. Join us and experience how the virtualization journey is helping transform IT and ushering in the era of Cloud Computing.

click here

Erm. What can I say without being cuffed and taken down to share a police cell with a large man called “Bubba”? Not much – but you will want to tune in…

OK. I admit it the ONLY reason for this blogpost title is get you to pay attention. I don’t really mean that at all. But now I’ve suckered you into reading this thing let me explain. I’ve written an article for TechTarget which is all about my take on VMware’s recent alliance with Novell. In case you don’t know – the top-level on this is that VMware has decide to standardize (now there’s a good idea) all its virtual appliances on Novel’s SUSE Linux. I think this a good step, as any standardization is a good thing in my book. It does raise the thorny question of where this leaves us with the whole JEOS concept – and that’s one of themes of my missive.

Read on McDuff

Inspired by an exchange between two bloggers – Scott Lowe (EMC) & Steve Chambers (Cisco) – I’ve stepped in to weigh in the balance – the desire for greater consolidation ratios against the dangers of putting too many eggs in one basket. Every generation seems to demand a new panacea – virtualization; the cloud – while the same old problems caused by what I call “stupid IT” persist.

The article is in two parts on the techtarget website:

How to simplify your IT and stop being stupid

Virtualisation is not a panacea and neither is the cloud

I’ve wrote this wee like article for TechTarget about the vMA – the VMware Management Assistant. Now, I’m a big fan of PowerCLI and PowerShell generally. But when it comes letting going of the Service Console and the ye olde esxcfg-commands its a bit of leap. That’s where I think the vMA will come into its own – you can carry on using those very same ESXCFG command you know (and love?) but just carry out them remotely. In the article I document how you setup the “Fast Pass” configuration which reduces the authentication required to get focus on the ESX host – to the point that you can run commands on a ESXi host as if it was ESX “Classic”. I challenge you to spot the difference! RIP COS…

http://searchvmware.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid179_gci1510368,00.html

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…

Many people think the key to the virtual data centre is about getting as many virtual machines (VMs) on a physical server as possible. It is still the case, however, that prohibitive memory costs are a roadblock to high consolidation ratios, and virtualisation availability tools still lag behind business need. They have not yet cancelled out the “eggs-in-one-basket” scenario that virtualisation endemically brings with it.

Read more…

In this article, we eschew the normal blue-sky 2010 technology predictions for something a bit more everyday that will affect your daily virtual life.

Scale up, up, up and away
Firstly, it’s no surprise that by mid-year there is likely to be a major rerelease of vSphere4 with a strong emphasis on increased scalability. Building on top of vSphere4′s current scalability I wouldn’t be surprised to see the number of vCPUs a single ESX host can support go beyond the 128 core range. I think it’s likely that by the end of 2010 or the beginning of 2011 we will be looking at more than 8 vCPUs to a VM – with VMware pushing the amount of RAM per-VM into the 512 GB to 1 TB range and the ESX host supporting 1 TB or 2 TB of physical RAM.

Read on…