RSS Feed from VirtualVCP http://www.virtualvcp.com 2010-03-19T05:45:56+01:00 http://www.virtualvcp.com http://www.virtualvcp.com/images/M_images/joomla_rss.png text/html 2010-03-10T14:59:41+01:00 http://www.virtualvcp.com http://www.virtualvcp.com/content/view/126/2/ I've been passed a press release regarding executive changes at PHD Virtual. The full press release to follow below: Virtual Machine Backup Leader, PHD Virtual, Names Thomas Charlton Chairman and CEO The Pioneer of Virtual Backup Appliances Adds Technology Management Expert to Corporate Team MOUNT ARLINGTON, N.J. – March 10, 2010 — PHD Virtual Technologies, award winning provider of esXpress VM Backup, the fastest multi-VM backup and restore solution on the market, today announced that Thomas Charlton has been appointed Chairman and CEO by the PHD Virtual board of directors. Charlton has more than 20 years of leadership experience in emerging technology ventures, leading past companies to increased profitability and successful acquisitions.“We are pleased to add Thomas to PHD Virtual’s corporate structure,” said Michael Triplett, managing director, Insight Venture Partners and PHD Virtual board member. “Thomas brings a wealth of company management expertise and innovation to PHD Virtual from his years of experience. His amazing track record in corporate growth and visionary thinking will help continue PHD Virtual’s dramatic growth.”Prior to joining PHD Virtual, Charlton was the CEO of multiple software companies, including Shunra Software (network emulation and appliances), VoiceGenie Technologies (Voice XML speech platform) and Trailblazer Systems (eCommerce EDI software). Responsible for each company’s strategic direction, revenue growth, profitability and global expansion, Charlton led Shunra and VoiceGenie to profitability, and led VoiceGenie and Trailblazer Sytems to successful acquisitions by Alcatel and Nu Bridges respectively. Charlton also served as CEO at Tidal Software (enterprise job scheduling) which was recently acquired by Cisco Systems, Inc.“I am excited about the opportunity that PHD Virtual represents based on the innovative technology it has built to address the growing data protection needs of the virtualization market,” said Charlton. “Customers with virtualized environments cannot adequately protect their growing information through traditional data protection... text/html 2010-02-08T11:53:33+01:00 http://www.virtualvcp.com http://www.virtualvcp.com/content/view/125/48/ This is more of a note for future reference rather than a blog post.I recently had to replace a RAID-10 member disk as the original disk had developed bad sectors and was causing mostly read related problems in the array. (That’s a whole other story it it’s won right and I don’t have time to get into that now). However, when I tried adding the replacement disk to the server, I found that the disk had a GPT table and not an msdos partition table, unlike the other 3 members in the RAID array. I was therefore unable to add the disk “as-is” to the RAID array as all disks are required to have the same partition table type. I therefore needed to remove the GUID Partition Table and replace it with an msdos partition table.My initial though was to use fdisk. However, fdisk does not understand GUID Partition Tables and therefore cannot remove such tables. The other tool that does understand GPT is a tool called “parted”.So to replace the GPT table with msdos, I did:parted /dev/sdcmklabel msdosquit If you are running Windows and would like to clear a GPT table, you may use the clean command in diskpart (Diskpart can be accessed from the command promtp) text/html 2010-01-24T19:55:45+01:00 http://www.virtualvcp.com http://www.virtualvcp.com/content/view/124/26/ Over the past few weeks I’ve heard a whole lot of arguments around vCenter design considerations. A few of the questions asked were: Do I install vCenter on 32bit or 64 bit?vCenter as a physical or Virtual machine?vCenter Database – Local or Remote?Placement of the Update Manager Server and Database Before I dig into the vCenter design topic, I think it would be good to put some perspective on this post and why I’ve decided to blog on this. Last week I attended a meeting with some fellow virtualisation consultants and one of the topics raised in the meeting was to find a common standard practise between us regarding vCenter Server design and specifically the “default” stance between the consultants in regards to the placement of the vCenter server and whether it should be a physical or a virtual machine. Some consultants were in favour of the idea of a default stace and others were against the idea, stating that the decision of vCenter being hosted on a physical or virtual machine is down to the circumstances of each consultancy engagement. Thinking back now, I don’t think we came to an agreement in the end.This post is basically my opinion on vCenter design, and the steps that I take in deciding what my infrastructure design will look like. Do I install vCenter on 32bit or 64bit?The simple answer to this question is: 64-bit! Why? Well future releases of vCenter will almost certainly be 64-bit only. This means that if you install vCenter 4.0 on a 32-bit Windows operating system today, you will have to rebuild the vCenter server as future releases of vCenter will not install on 32-bit Windows. In simple terms, if you are on 32-bit Windows now, you will not be able to do a simple upgrade... text/html 2010-01-12T09:30:44+01:00 http://www.virtualvcp.com http://www.virtualvcp.com/content/view/123/2/ I've received information of Novell’s intentions to include support for VMware vNetworking Distributed switches in vSphere. Currently, when performing migrations to vSphere using Novell Platespin Migrate, the tool fails to properly detect VMware vNetworking Distributed Switches, preventing any migration operation from using them.Novell product management have potentially scheduled the support of vDS for June 2010.If you are going to be using Platespin Migrate to perform migrations in a vSphere environment that utilises vDS networking, Platespin Migrate will require a standard virtual switch, including at least 1 port group. text/html 2010-01-07T18:29:24+01:00 http://www.virtualvcp.com http://www.virtualvcp.com/content/view/122/48/ As I have now rebuilt my Openfiler 2.3 iSCSI box, I thought that it would be wise to document the procedure as I have installed Openfiler on a USB memory stick. This was something I’ve wanted to do this for a while now. Basically, I’m trying to cut back on the number hard disk drives in my environment. If therefore decided to install Openfiler on a USB memory stick instead of another hard drive. I could then run 4 750GB SATA drives in RAID10 and leave the Openfiler OS to run on the USB stick.As most servers can boot from USB, I didn’t expect any issues with installing and booting Openfiler from USB. However, Openfiler doesn’t load the USB storage drivers when it boots by default. You’ll have to tweak the initrd image in order to boot from USB. I recommend you use a 2GB or 4GB memory stick. Although Openfiler can install in less that 1GB, you still want to leave some free space for logs and swap space. I used the SanDisk Cruzer Micro 4GB as it's a small device (physically) and it's made out of metal and not plastic and should be a little more durable. The server I've used is the HP ProLiant ML115 G5. This server has a USB port located on the motherboard which is perfect! As the USB memory stick will be located inside the server, it won't be be dangling on the outside where it can be removed by accident . You know what people are like ;-)1. Unplug all SATA drives from the server. This is so that Openfiler detects the USB flash memory as /dev/sda and not as “/dev/sde” or something. It just makes things a little neater and simpler later... text/html 2009-12-31T00:30:59+01:00 http://www.virtualvcp.com http://www.virtualvcp.com/content/view/121/2/ I am sure many of you have noticed that this site has been unavailable at times during the last two or so weeks. This is because I’ve been plagued with problems relating to my iSCSI SAN. The annoying thing is that the problems only started when I decided to move from the stable release of vSphere 4, running ESX Server and not ESXi, to a beta release of ESXi. This has now made troubleshooting the issues more complex as I’m not quite sure whether the issues are related to the new beta version or if it’s simply down to my iSCSI SAN, which is running Openfiler 2.3. The highlight of the day was my wife’s statement: “If AOL, Google, Yahoo and those people can keep their systems online, why can’t you?” Well, let’s see... The difference is that my solution is a few hundred £££, not millions! You get what you pay for! So, earlier today, I’ve decided to install the beta version of ESX rather than ESXi, but the problems still seem to be there. At the moment, I’m working on a slow and painful plan to move all the data (and we’re talking TBs here) from the iSCSI solution to a NAS. This will give me reduced performance, but it will at least allow me to rebuild my iSCSI SAN. I will also be going back to the stable release of ESX 4.0 for this environment and do my beta testing somewhere else (maybe in the solution centre at work). I do apologise if www.virtualvcp.com (/) is down at times, but I’m working as hard as I possibly can with a limited budget to resolve the issues asap. text/html 2009-12-14T11:02:22+01:00 http://www.virtualvcp.com http://www.virtualvcp.com/content/view/120/2/ So you're designing a new Virtual Infrastructure on VMware right? Ok, one of the first decisions that your client will have to make is whether to virtualise on VI3 or vSphere. At this stage I'd say it would be a rather silly move to go with VI3.5 as VMware vSphere 4 GA has been available for quite some time now. However, I still see new designs based on VI3.5 being signed off. So why would I rather go for vSphere 4 and not VI3.5? Here are some my reasons:We all know that vSphere is stable for production, if not more stable than VI3.5Although vSphere 4 has more bells and whistles than VI3.5, it can still do what VI3.5 does. It just does it, well, better that VI3.5 in my opinion.As people have learnt with ESX 2.5 when VI3 was released, you'll have to upgrade eventually. Sooner or later, you'll have to upgrade from VI3.5, so why do all the work twice? Why build a VI3.5 solution only to upgrade to vSphere 4 eventually anyway? I'm not saying that you should go with the latest release, in fact, my policy is to always hold off one or two months before upgrading to the latest release of anything.Well, ok, so now you have decided to go with vSphere right? Here's the next question... Do I run a 32-bit or 64-bit OS for my vCenter server? Do I install Windows 2003 32-bit or Windows 2003 64-Bit? Or, do I install Windows 2008 R2, which is 64-bit anyway? Now, I may be able to point you in the right direction here. As I'm bound by non-disclosure agreements for most of the information I have from VMware, I won't be able to say too much about anything I've been working with in the past few... text/html 2009-10-22T15:48:26+01:00 http://www.virtualvcp.com http://www.virtualvcp.com/content/view/119/2/ I have just downloaded and deployed CapacityIQ and it all went fine until I actually decided to register my vCenter server with the appliance, only to find out that the newest product by VMware does not even support vCenter 4, or in fact vSphere! That will teach me to read the release notes before actually bothering to try something new. This is what the release notes have to say:CapacityIQ supports VirtualCenter 2.5, Update 4 and Update 5, managing hosts running ESX Server 3.0.2 through 3.5. CapacityIQ 1.0 does not support VMware vSphere 4.0 or vCenter 4.0 Am I dreaming? What's going on here? VMware, why did you even bother? Heck, why did I even bother? text/html 2009-10-21T12:40:27+01:00 http://www.virtualvcp.com http://www.virtualvcp.com/content/view/118/2/ VMware has yet again delivered another value-add component to vCenter. vCenter CapacityIQ provides capacity management capabilities for virtualised data centre and or desktop environments. The product integrates with vCenter Server ensuring that your virtualised capacity is always predictable and efficiently used.The product website states: “VMware vCenter CapacityIQ balances business demand with IT supply, without compromising performance, availability and security. With CapacityIQ, your IT infrastructure is guaranteed to have sufficient capacity to meet any business service level agreements.” Once I have had a good play with CapacityIQ (which I intend on doing sometime this week), I will report back with my review of the product.More information on vCenter CapacityIQ can be found at: http://www.vmware.com/products/vcenter-capacityiq/ (http://www.vmware.com/products/vcenter-capacityiq/) text/html 2009-10-13T16:31:12+01:00 http://www.virtualvcp.com http://www.virtualvcp.com/content/view/117/26/ Myself, along with two of my colleagues, went on a day trip to this year’s IPEXPO Earls Court in London where we were shown a demo of esXpress at PHD Virtual Technology’s booth. We were very impressed by the presentation and some of the futures of esXpress. We were especially interested in the File Level Recovery features of their data De-Duplication appliance.When I got back home from IPEXPO on Thursday, I decided to test the product for myself. So, I went on to download a 30 day evaluation from http://www.phdvirtual.com/ (http://www.phdvirtual.com/) and I can surely say that I’ve been putting PHD Virtual esXpress 3.6 through some vigorous testing for the past few days. To start off with, I found esXpress easy to deploy and I was quite impressed with it. However I must confess that when I really started to dig into how esXpress goes about its business I started to have some concerns about it. However, I have decided not make any my concerns public until I have had a good chat with some people at PHD Virtual as I think that they will have an answer to most of my questions. text/html 2009-09-24T10:48:22+01:00 http://www.virtualvcp.com http://www.virtualvcp.com/content/view/115/2/ For those of you who do not yet know, VMware has launched it's official vSphere blog.The new VMware vSphere Blog will be VMware's central place to check for news, commentary, links to new resources, and other information about VMware vSphere. The blog's editor is Mike Adams. The blog can be found at http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere (http://blogs.vmware.com/vsphere) text/html 2009-09-22T13:26:56+01:00 http://www.virtualvcp.com http://www.virtualvcp.com/content/view/114/2/ Some interesting reading: SAN FRANCISCO, Sep 22, 2009 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Today HyTrust demonstrated new technological capabilities jointly developed with Intel and VMware, aimed at enhancing security and policy enforcement in cloud computing environments. This proof of concept combines HyTrust Appliance with Intel(R) Trusted Execution Technology (Intel(R) TXT) and VMware platform technology currently in development to show customers how they can build and enforce policies that govern the behavior of virtualized cloud infrastructure. Cloud computing is gaining momentum as a way for customers to dynamically scale virtualized computing resources as a service on demand based on business need. Users need not have knowledge of, expertise in, or control over the technology infrastructure in the cloud that supports them. As customers turn to cloud computing for its benefits--convenient, cost effective, on-demand access of computing resources--they are seeking a trusted platform that is secure and provides service identity. Read the rest of the article here: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/hytrust-aligns-with-vmware-to-bring-trusted-computing-to-virtualized-cloud-infrastructure-2009-09-22 (http://www.marketwatch.com/story/hytrust-aligns-with-vmware-to-bring-trusted-computing-to-virtualized-cloud-infrastructure-2009-09-22) text/html 2009-09-22T08:41:28+01:00 http://www.virtualvcp.com http://www.virtualvcp.com/content/view/113/2/ I've just stumbled upon the following article. The writer actually accuses VMware of being lazy in that they've failed to develop a vSphere client that works out of the box for Windows 7! How messed up do you get? As far as I know, Windows 7 has not had its official release yet and can only be obtained via TechNet and MSDN. So all, let's blame someone for not developing a piece of software for an OS that's not really released yet!Get a life! Oh, and maybe try buying a domain as well! Or wait, maybe you're too lazy or cheap to buy a domain, hence the reason we're all looking at an IP address in your URL...Here's the article:http://99.246.113.36/wtslabs/blog/?p=53 (http://99.246.113.36/wtslabs/blog/?p=53) text/html 2009-09-21T16:11:20+01:00 http://www.virtualvcp.com http://www.virtualvcp.com/content/view/112/2/ It’s now a done deal. VMware has officially completed their acquisition of SpringSource. SpringSource is an enterprise and web application development company and will now be seen as a division of VMware. The CEO of SpringSource will serve as the division’s general manager.VMware says that the new division’s “charter” will be to focus on providing developers and customers the best experience for developing enterprise and web applications, as well as helping VMware create integrated products based on SpringSource technologies and VMware vSphere to deliver a simplified ‘build, run and manage’ experience. These new products will help VMware’s cloud computing strategy to deliver PaaS (Platform as Service) solutions that can be hosted by their customers internally or by service providers. text/html 2009-09-17T17:04:49+01:00 http://www.virtualvcp.com http://www.virtualvcp.com/content/view/111/2/ In today’s world where mission critical applications need to be available 24x7 with 99.99% availability, companies are throwing millions of dollars or pounds at implementing redundant and fault tolerant infrastructures. We all know that the money we spend today will save us much more in the future. Some companies make two to three million profit each and every day. In order to be competitive in the current climate, they need business applications such as messaging and collaboration to be available at all times. Imagine if a business with hundreds of employees one day suddenly lost the ability to send and receive email.This may sound unheard of, but just this very week I’ve dealt with such a case where a company employing almost 10,000 people had no email, collaboration, database systems and even a corporate website for more than 24 hours, just because a critical component failed on their main SAN. Now let’s just say they make on average 2 million pounds profit each day. They had no business trading on the day of the failure, costing them a huge part of that 2 million pounds profit as the 10,000 people they employ had to be paid for that day an no one could do any meaningful work. If they had only spend half of that on a replication solution for their SAN, they could have avoided such a lengthy outage. text/html 2009-09-15T15:22:18+01:00 http://www.virtualvcp.com http://www.virtualvcp.com/content/view/110/26/ I’ve been trying to install VMware vCenter Server on Windows Server 2008 R2 Enterprise Edition. This is because I am working on a few blog articles on protecting the vCenter Server against hardware failures. At the moment, I’m busy working on two blog posts.1. Protecting vCenter with VMware vCenter Server heartbeat;2. Protecting vCenter with Microsoft Cluster Services (MSCS). Whilst trying to install vCenter on Windows Server 2008 R2, I ran into some issues I had to resolve before I could do anything useful. text/html 2009-09-01T00:00:00+01:00 http://www.virtualvcp.com http://www.virtualvcp.com/content/view/109/2/ VMware announced vCloud Express™ at VMworld 2009. vCloud Express allows for the provisioning of infrastructure on-demand. Unlike conventional hosting, services running inside the cloud provided by vCloud Express services are charged for by the hour. This is paid for by credit card. The credit card details are taken upon registering for a vCloud Express account with a service provider that provides vCloud Express services. Service providers who will provide vCloud Express services, will display the VMware Virtualized™ logo on the website. This is because VMware vCloud Express™ essentially runs on vSphere and it therefore ensures compatibility with VMware environments on external as well as internal clouds. With vCloud Express™, service providers can now provide a fast and cost-effective solution for their customers to gain on-demand access to a VMware Virtualized™ environment. Virtual Machines can be easily and quickly be deployed. This is especially useful for application development and testing. As vCloud Express™ runs on vSphere 4, it also supports all the guest operating systems that vSphere 4 supports. From registration to deploying machines, vCloud Express™ is fully web based. Terremarks’s implementation of VMware vCloud Express™ was demonstrated on stage at VMworld 2009. The demonstration was quick and easy and demonstrated just how easy vCloud Express™ makes it for clients to register for the service and provision a server in minutes. Although still in Beta, the following service providers are currently offering vCloud Express™ services: United States and Canada (Amaricas):Terremark, Hosting.com, BlueLockEMEA:LogicaAPAC:Melbourne IT text/html 2009-08-24T13:58:11+01:00 http://www.virtualvcp.com http://www.virtualvcp.com/content/view/108/2/ As I'm trying to get to grips with Hyper-V, I've decided to purchase MS techNet Plus which allows a single user to use any of Microsoft's software products for private use for one year.A TechNet Plus subscription is normally £234.00 excl. VAT at 21.5% (If you live in the EU, VAT is charged at the Irish rate of 21.5%). This comes to £284.31. However, I found a discount code that gives you 25% off. The total amount for my purchase came to £213.43.The Promo Code is: TMSAM10 text/html 2009-07-24T13:31:45+01:00 http://www.virtualvcp.com http://www.virtualvcp.com/content/view/107/26/ In ESX 3.5, when trying to create a new snapshot, the following error is reported in the VI Client:An invalid snapshot configuration was detectedAlso, when reading the Virtual Machine log file (vmware.log) located in the same location as the VM, you may find references to delta files such as vm_name-000001.vmdk , but when browsing the datastore, the delta file does not exists. Also, when running vmware-cmd <path-to-vmx> hassnapshot, hassnapshot ()= is returned, which means that the VM has no snapshots in place.If this is truly the case, why is An invalid snapshot configuration was detected returned when trying to create a new snapshot?VMware records snapshot information about the current VM in a .vmsd file. This file is located with the rest of the virtual machine configuration and VMDK files on the datastore. The file is normally called <virtual-machine-name>.vmsd. This file will contain information, even if your VM has no snapshots in place.It is possible that in some cases, ESX fails to properly clean up after previous snapshots were removed. The information for previous snapshots may still be recorded in the .vmsd file. The file may indicate that you still have snapshots in pace, although all previous snapshots were removed and the dalta files have been merged. When you then try to create a snapshot, the .vmsd file will inform the ESX host that there is a delta file in place and that it has to create a second or third delta file. When the ESX host interigates the VMFS file system, it's unable to find the snapshot delta files specified in the .vmsd file and therefore errors with an invalid snapshot configuration was detected. text/html 2009-07-14T15:41:02+01:00 http://www.virtualvcp.com http://www.virtualvcp.com/content/view/106/26/ Today I was planning on testing the new 16 patches released by VMware for vSphere 4. I wanted to place these on my 2nd ESX host. I normally place my ESX hosts in maintenance mode before I remedaite updates. As I placed esx2 in maintenance mode, the VMs, as expected, started to migrate over to the other hosts in the cluster with VMotion. The VMotion migration of two of my VMs running Windows XP, failed with the following error message: A general system error occurred: Failed to write checkpoint data (offset 33558328, size 16384): Limit exceeded It turns out that a VM must have less than 30MB Video RAM or VRAM assigned in order to be compatible with VMotion. As I normally run these two VMs at 1680 x 1050 resolution, I went all out an assigned the maximum amount of memory allowed, which is 128MB as VRAM, hence the reason for the VMotion failure.