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EMC has introduced a new line of Symmetrix products. The new Symmetrix products can start small and expand up to support the largest virtual datacenter infrastructures.

EMC Claims that the new Symmetrix V-Max and V-Max SE (Virtual Matrix Architecture) storage arrays can scale up to hundreds of thousands of terabytes of storage and is capable of supporting hundreds of thousands of virtual machines.

The Virtual Matrix Architecture is built on the V-Max engine, which contains all the necessary disk and I/O ports along with multiple Intel quad-core processors, up to 126GB of memory and the Engenuity operating system [by EMC].

EMC marketing vice president Barbara Robidoux said that the new V-Max architecture is "the single biggest innovation for the storage industry in years. Each Symmetrix Frame can fit up to eight V-Max engines. This gives a total of 1TGB of memory and twice the front-end and back-end connectors supported by EMC's current high-end DMX-4 systems. Also, an entry-level V-Max SE costs 10% less than a DMX-4, but due to Intel's quad-core processors, the V-Max offers significantly better performance.

Connectivity options include:

• Fibre Channel
• iSCSI
• Gigabit Ethernet
• Ficon for IBM mainframe systems.

Now, I'm off to get one for my home lab ;-)

After patching some test ESX hosts with ESX 3.5 Update 4, the problem with the VMware tools being shown as "Not running" after a VCB backup operation seems to have been solved. This has cured some backup woes at least.

I will now run ESX 3.5 Update 4 in a test cluster (with virtual machines that will be backed up with VCB) for a few of weeks before updating production ESX hosts to Update 4.

Last week we started having problems with VCB Backups. Normally while a VCB backup job is in progress the VI Client will report that the VM tools is not running on the VM that's being backed up. When the VCB backup job completes, the status of the VMware Tools changes from "Not running" to OK.

However, I've seen cases where even after the VCB job completes, the VMware Tools status fails to change from "Not running" to "OK". If you then try to run a VCB job on the same VM, the job will fail if the VCBMounter is set to look for the virtual machine IP rather than virtual machine name or UUID.

I first noticed this problem on Monday, 16 March, but a couple of days later I found a VMware KB article dated 18 March 2009 which describes the exact same issue. The problem seems to be occurring only on hosts with patch bundle ESX350-200901401-SG. However, instead of offering a fix to the issue, VMware is only offering a few workarounds. I hope they release a patch to fix this issue soon.

Some workarounds given by VMware are:

1. Restart the mgmt-vmware service immediately after the backup job is done. This changes the Tools status to OK. You can write a cron job to do it periodically.
   
   OR
   
1. Log in and log out, or log out if you are already logged in, from the virtual machine. This changes the Tools status to OK if it was showing as Not running.
   
   OR
   
2. Use VCBMounter to look for virtual machine name or UUID rather than virtual machine IP. Virtual machine IP only works when the status of tools is OK, but virtual machine name and UUID works even if the Tools status shows as Not running.

My preferred workaround: 

I find that restarting the VMware Tools Service in the guest OS always gets by the problem, but loggin into every single VM that reports the wrong status for it's VMware Tools could be a bit of a drag. So I choose to do this remotely rather that logging on to each VM.

From any Windows workstation/server, open a command pompt and run:

sc \\{vm-name-or-ip-address} stop "VMTools"
sc \\{vm-name-or-ip-address} start "VMTools"

Information on this issue can be found on the VMware Knowledge Base article: KB1008709

It is good to see that VMware has managed to keep momentum even as Citrix and Microsoft launched their Hypervisors as an onslaught on VMware's Virtualisation market share. Now, even today customers still select VMware Virtual Infrastructure as the best platform to run Microsoft Exchange. I guess this goes to show that although Microsoft and Citrix may be catching up, VMware is still miles ahead in the race and this is why I say so:

I've been playing around with Windows 2008 R2 Beta with Hyper-V for a little while now to try and get a feel for what it does and how it does it. Even though I'm a hardened VMware supporter (this is no secret by now, and I'll stay a hardened VMware supporter for the foreseeable future), I do think Microsoft is making steps in the right direction. I haven't really had enough time to play with Citrix XenServer, so I can't really comment on that. I have no doubt that Hyper-V on Windows 2008 R2 will be a good product. However, even though Microsoft seems to be throwing everything they have at their attempts to get Hyper-V and their entire package on par with VMware, it still just feels like they’re are just about trying to catch up with the functionality of, well, VI3!, a product that is just about to be superseded by the new VMware vSphere. Now I don't have the exact details, but I'm sure vSphere will be released later this year. vSphere will have an enormous amount of new functionality (some of which may still be well kept secrets by VMware). If vSphere is released this year with lots of new bells and whistles, what will Microsoft have to do to get Windows 2008 R2 on par with vSphere? Time will tell I guess.

Anyway, back to Exchange on VMware. I found this article on the topic:
http://www.businesswire.com/portal/site/google/?ndmViewId=news_view&newsId=20090310005551&newsLang=en