Virtualization Team

As our company is a partner of VMware, Citrix, & Microsoft. Yop, you heard it all of them at one shop. I get to visit many customers & try to help them find the best virtualization product for their enviornment. Lately, I have noticed a tendancy of many customers saying, “I will go Hyper-V as Microsoft know how to virtualize their products better than others.” It seems the Microsoft local partners have found a good stereo type to use that “the solution for every customer virtualization need is a hammer.”

I decided to do some study & find out if Microsoft really support their products in Virtualization better than others & below some of the findings that make me believe the opposite.

We have finally just finished the face left to our blog. We hope you like it better than the earlier design. Below are few of the improvement in the design:

1- Faster Load time.

2- Better search functionality.

3- Compatible with more web browsers.

4- Eliminated the html errors we had with the earlier design.

5- Less Ads.  (I know many of you wish there will be no ads at all, but we have to pay for our hosting & ISP. Though we have reduced the ads to minimum and removed them from interfering while reading the articles and comments).

Please let us know what do you think of the new design, & if you have any further suggestion.

One of the errors my customers repeatly complain about while upgrading to vCenter Server 4 or even when trying to install it from scratch is the following error:

“The DSN is pointing to an unsupported ODBC driver. Please re-configure your DSN to use one of the supported drivers.”

If you face this problem the first thing to do is to ensure that you are running a supported Database. Hint! Hint! SQL 2000 is no longer supported. If you are running SQL 2000 then you must upgrade to SQL 2005 or SQL 2008 before upgrading to vCenter Server 4.0

As a start don’t let the title fool you this is not related only to Microsoft virtualization, but to every virtualization platform out there. Don’t let vendors mislead you as the saving can be higher on Microsoft Licenses with non Microsoft Hyper-visor like VMware where you can put more virtual machines on the same hardware box. Ok, so clearing the confusion out of the way read below to find out what I am talking about.

Being on the consulting role, I get to meet customers everyday on all levels (Administrators, Managers, CEOs,  Directors, Business). When they ask our advice on consolidating their enviornment & I bring the idea of virtualization one question I get hammared with every time ” How would paying for virtualization licensing is going to save us money?”.  Below are some of our & yours traditional answers & how a stubrn customer will reply to it:

I have been contacted by Kevin Tolly the founder of http://CommonTestPlan.org to evaluate their Virtual Server Performance Test Plan & provide suggestions in that regard about two weeks ago. Kevin & his team were kind enough to provide me with a one year license to their Virtual Server Performance Test Plan Document for my own personal use without any string attached. I believe they are offering the same to many other Virtualization Experts around the globe in order to improve their document & get some honest feed backs from professionals who hit the virtualization field on daily basis. Below is my honest review & thoughts of the document.

Being on the vendor side & visiting many customers a day who is looking to find out which virtualization solution fit them best has made me used to the question:  “Which virtualization solution is the right one for me?”

I wish there was an easy answer, where I can say this solution or that solution is best for every customer. As each customer is unique & has its own unique requirements there is no one solution that fit all. Below are few points I always bring to my customers attentions to take into consideration when helping them decide on the best virtualizaiton solution for their enviornment & thought might help many of you taking the right decision.

It seems Red Had is shifting their focus from Xen as their virtualization platform to KVM. Their new Red Hat Enterprise Virtualizaiton solution is based on KVM. It seems that Red Hat Enterprise Virtualizaiton Solution, when combined with their new management tool called RHEV-M will offer many advanced features. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Solution seems to successfully copy many of VMware and other Virtualization vendors features like: 1- Live Migration 2- Load Distribution 3- Clustering & High Availability 4- Memory over Commitment 5- Transparent Memory Page sharing 6- Virtual Machine Snapshot 7- Host maintenance mode & many other feature. If you have been using VMware for a while all these features should be familiar to you, though Red Hat are promising that their pricing model will be much cheaper than VMware. I have not got to see Red Hat pricing yet, and it will be too early to compare the two products pricing. Before sharing a video of Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization with you, I believe its worth to mention that reading Red Hat data sheet of the product as well watching their marketing demo video make Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization seem too good to be true for the kind of pricing Red hat is promising to offer. Its worth to note there is one catch to this product at the moment, its not as easy to setup as you expect unless you are a Red Hat guru. In another words if you are not a Red Hat guru & never had setup a Red Hat cluster & GFS, then Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Solution will be a steep learning curve for you. I really hope Red Hat will look into making their system setup easier and totally independent of how they currently setup clustering. I believe it should be some how included in RHEV-M interface instead of having to use the Red Hat Clustering Interfaces. That have been said I hope you enjoy the video below: : If yo u care to learn more about the product, you might want to look at the great break out session published at: http://www.virtualization.info/2009/09/red-hat-releases-enterprise-linux-54.html

I know I have been pushing back my vSphere exam for a while due to the amount of projects I am working on this year. I have finally passed my exam two days back with a blazing score of 494(haha thought it would be quite lower than this, but I guess the elimination process of answers that does not make sense had worked out very well on this one). I would love to thank everyone in the VMware community who had posted tips for the VCP exam especially Kumaran, Brian, Scott Vessey.  As my return to the community I have decided to post some tips for the exam:

As most of you already know VMware Storage VMotion is the ability to live migrate a virtual machine from one storage to another without any downtime. The usage most IT Professional relate to VMware Storage VMotion is the following:

The ability to move your virtual machines from a storage or datastore to another for maintenance reason or storage replacement without downtime. Though I had just came to discover another reason where it became vital. Thanks to Vladan as he brought it to my attention when he commented on my previous post:  VMware ESX 4 Reclaiming Thin Provisioned disk Unused Space

Disk Thin Provisioning & its ease of use in VMware vSphere has been one of the most used features. Although Thin provisioning has allowed customers to avoid allocating space upfront & saved them tons of space, it does not unallocate space when files are deleted from the Virtual Machine, this is due to the way Windows & other operating systems handle file deletion.

In many cases, the customer will create a Thin Provisioned disk with 80GB & use 10 GB out of it. At this time that Virtual Machine will only use 10 GB on the ESX host. Few days later, he might require to use another 50GB for a temporary purpose. Now he will have the Virtual Machine using 60 GB on the ESX host. After few days he go and delete the files that is occupying the temporary 50GB, then he will discover that the virtual machine does not shrink as he delete files from it & he still has a 50GB of wasted space.

Today I have received an e-mail from Veeam, announcing that Veeam Backup & Replication 4.1 is fully supporting VMware ESXi including the replication to VMware ESXi host as a target. Below is the body of Veeam announcement e-mail:

======= Veeam Announcement =========

Veeam proudly announces the upcoming release of Veeam Backup & Replication 4.1 with full support for replication to ESXi hosts!

By moving your virtual infrastructure to ESXi, you can gain the benefits of better security and compliance while still achieving your desired RPOs / RTOs.

Veeam Backup & Replication 4.1 will provide no-limits support for restoring and replicating to ESXi. You’ll get all the advanced features of Veeam replication, including the ability to fail over to both the latest and earlier points in time, when replicating to ESXi.

Don’t get me wrong. I am happy with the current VMware CEO as well the VMware team as over all. My post is more of a message to the VMware Team & specially the CEO. I believe this below tip can help VMware crush the competition, though they have to study it carefully as it require a brave decision.

Since VMware started & it has been successfully gliding of the nice waves. It has always lead the competition by the quality of its product, as well the essential feature that no one else had. Although no one else had succeeded on over come the reliability & performance of VMware yet, many of the essential features has been replicated in many other Virtualization products in the market. Nonetheless VMware has always been able to innovate new features that customers will desire, customers started thinking that they could wait a year more and get this feature in a cheaper product, which has enough features for their current setup. Yes, I will spell it out many are looking at Hyper-v in this manner.

Before I start with the article, I have to point out this is not a VMware bug. Its the VMware admins doing what they are not suppose to do. VMware ESX 3 & VMware ESX 4 Administration Guides mention clearly that you should not VMotion or Storage vMotion a Virtual machine before disconnecting it from CD Media & ISO images that is only available to the first host or Datastore. Actually it will even warn you when you trying to do that.

I have seen tons of articles talking about the differences between VMware ESX & VMware ESXi, but I have not seen many that discuss when to use them. I have noticed that many of my customers get even more confused when reading comparisons between the two, as not all of them have deep understanding of the Virtualization Technology. That means they got to know the differences, but still wondering which one is best fit for their environments. Below is few rules that can put you on the right path.

After a week of testing and fuzzing with both VizionCore vReplicator originally known by esxReplicator as well Veeam Backup & Replication, I was able to be one of the contributor to the new comparison at ITComparison.com.

The comparison titled VizionCore vReplicator (esxReplicator) vs Veeam Backup & Replication covers many important aspects of the two products. It has been well crafted to help IT professionals find out which product is better for their enviornment. I was glad all this collaboration with other virtualizaiton professionals has met up with success & the comparison was released to the public yesterday.