Planet vSphere-land

Even before I left VMware for EMC I was being asked to comment on “thin on thin”: the use of VMware thin VMDKs on virtually/thin provisioned storage.  As a VMware employee I recommended VMware’s thin provisioning but referred to storage vendors for their own best practices. Now, as a member of the storage vendor community, I will answer for EMC. I will do so with detailed text...

Yesterday VMware announced that it will be supporting RAID 5 and 6 with their Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA). With the release of vSphere 5, VMware also released their VSA, a shared storage solution for the SMB market. VMware VSA uses the local storage in each ESXi server, presents it to the VSA appliance which in [...] by Erik Scholten

At the moment I’m working through the typo corrections for the second pressing of the SRM 5.0 book. In the main these are little corrections in the text. But occasionally, I come across something a little bit more major. You would not believe how much work goes into the review process – but even the most rigorous process – its still possible for something to sl...

This is a tool I've been using almost daily in my current project and for the past few months. Now It's finally been released to the public! The tool has been created by Chuck Hirtsius – one of the EUC Specialist's within VMware.  The release you see here today is the first release of the tool that provides log file visualization as well as real-time monitoring of the PCo...

VMturbo has released Operations Manager 3.0 New major upgrade to VMturbo’s flagship product has just been released with XenServer and vCloud Director support. In previous release of VMturbo’s product the VMware vSphere and Hyper-V has been supported already. The product licensing suite stays as before – per physical CPU socket, with Free Community edition, which is Full Produ...

The EMC VNX and VMware vSphere Techbook (this the reference text for any customers/partners/EMCers who use EMC VNX arrays with vSphere – which translates to a LOT of people) has been updated! It is downloadable – so click the link...

I haven’t seen anyone reporting this yet, even the scoopmeister Eric Sloof has posted this. I just heard (thanks for the anonymous tip) that the date has changed for VMworld Europe! Don’t miss VMworld 2012! Barcelona October 9-11 Learn about the latest virtualization technologies and strategies which can help your organization realize its’ vision for a cloud computing approach to IT. ...

As most of you have noticed by now I am a heavy user of Social Media (Twitter, Google +, Facebook). VMware acquired, and is working on, some very interesting products which all have a common theme: Enterprise Collaboration. In this post I want to give an overview of products that I’m using and are available today or which have been announced. These solutions allows me to communicate with m...

vSphere 5 brought new filesystem VMFS 5 – your questions about it? Yesterday I took the VCP 510 exam. I passed fine, and I updated the post - Resources to prepare your VCP exam – VCP 510 – with my own experience there. And sure, there has been questions about the new VMFS 5 – new version of VMware Filesystem. I can’t tell your what exactly those questions were ...

The date for VMworld Europe is now final. The 2012 edition will take place from Tuesday 9 to Thursday 11 October in Barcelona. San Francisco August 27-30 Barcelona October 9-11 The event in Copenhagen last year was a great success. There were more than 200 breakout sessions, over 20 hands-on labs and more than 7,200 [...] by Edwin Weijdema

More and more applications are supported on the VMware Platform, with the release of VMware vSphere 5 the boundaries of virtual machines have been expanded even more. Often we get questions about which applications are supported on the VMware virtual platform. There is a website page where you can search for specific applications and if [...] by Edwin Weijdema

September,2011 I launched a community program called “The VDI Read/Write Ratio Challenge”. The objective of the program was to identify the real production IOPS baseline for VDI deployments. Thank you all of you who contributed to with your numbers! Unfortunately we are still short on data with only 15 valid entries. Approximately 6 entries were discarded due to inconsistent data. Please, fi...

This is the first part of the PCoIP Trilogy that I will be working on over the coming weeks. In this part I am looking at how to troubleshoot PCoIP issues using the new PCoIP Log Viewer. I'll take you step-by-step through the PCoIP log information, explaining what each counter means. I have also added a small case study which I'm hoping will help you inturprut the data a little better, a...

Starwind’s Hyper-V backup plug-in to backup/recovery VMs in Hyper-V environments. This webminar is organized by Starwind Software this Thursday. In case you’re planning to run, or you’re already running Hyper-V in your environment, you might be interested in backup solutions. Starwind software has recently introduced new backup solution which integrates as a Plug-in. What yo...

Here is a new free video from the New VMware View 5 training course released by Trainsignal. In this video, Brian Knudston will show you How to deploy personalized virtual desktops in VMware View 5. This new training has been released just last week and I already reported on that in this article here where you can watch another free video from this training course. It’s a sample part of ...

vSphere 5.0 can be confgured to enable VMware ESXi host swapping to a solid-state disk (SSD). In the low host memory–available states (high memory usage), where guest ballooning, transparent page sharing (TPS) and memory compression have not been sufcient to reclaim the needed host memory, hypervisor swapping is used as the last resort to reclaim memory from the virtual machines. vSpher...

I got an interesting question from one of my co-authors of the PowerCLI Reference book. He was looking for a method to find the port used by a VM when connected to a portgroup on a dvSwitch. Finding the answer to that question is not too difficult, once you know which property holds the value. But while writing and testing the script, I thought that this question would be a good opportunity to s...

This is the first and only official guide to VMware's new VCP510 (VCP 5) exam. Organized to follow VMware's newest exam blueprint, it's also designed from the ground up to be both engaging and enjoyable. Author Bill Ferguson acts like a "study buddy," encouraging virtualization professionals, anticipating their questions, and helping them gain both mastery and confidence. Througho...

The Microsoft Security Essentials is free for use on genuine Windows systems. The Microsoft Security Essentials is free anti malware software which can be found on this page here. As said it’s free if runs on genuine system. As I was pleasantly surprised that the soft is quite lightweight, getting few dozens of Mb in the taskbar…. It’s available as a no-cost download for Wind...

VMware vCenter Infrastructure Navigator is an application awareness plug-in to vCenter Server, and provides continuous dependency mapping of applications. Infrastructure Navigator offers application context to the virtual infrastructure administrators to monitor and manage the virtual infrastructure inventory objects and actions. Administrators can use Infrastructure Navigator to understand...

New Training for VMware View 5 by Trainsignal. After VMware Education official trainiNewng, other, self paced training courses starting to appear. Like the new training done by Trainsignal. As an Instructors –  Brian Knudston and Lane Leverett. You might know Brian Knudston already since I’ve done a full review of the View 4.6 training course on my website last year – VMwar...

VMware vCenter Server allows you to centrally manage hosts from either a physical or virtual Windows machine, and enables the use of advanced features such as vSphere Distributed Resource Scheduler (DRS), vSphere High Availability (HA), vSphere vMotion, vSphere Storage vMotion, and vSphere Auto Deploy. You can install vCenter Server in a Microsoft Windows virtual machine that runs on an ESX...

My post on vCloud Director Allocations Models back in September 2010 has always done fairly well in terms of view/visits. Lately I have been receiving some offline questions about how valid this article still is with vCloud Director 1.5 so I decided to go through the same exercise here. Instead of doing a full copy I will just copy and paste the characteristics section for each of the three diff...

Where to recover lost storage space in your virtual infrastructure? The storage space on your shared storage, where you VMs lays out is precious and expensive. In this new whitepaper from vKernel which title says it all - Removing Data Waste from Virtualized Storage – you’ll be able to learn the basics. To identify the waste space which can be recovered and used again for your pro...

So – on Jan 24th – EMC announced our Q4 2011 financial results, and our 2012 outlook. This isn’t the place for financial analysis (and I’m no financial analyst), EMC killed it. It all starts with our customers, and our...