Virtualization Team

Don’t get me wrong. I really love Apple & VMware, though I have received this in my e-mail few days back and thought its kinda funny and decided to share it.

Where will Apple Lovers stay in VMworld?

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Guess ????

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Keep looking further down

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Well, believe it or not this hotel was one of the hotels recommended by VMware for VMworld. A great choice to attract Apple lovers . I wonder if you get a discount for carrying your iMac, iPad, iPhone with you to the hotel.

Veeams to add a new free Capacity planning functions to their Veeam Reporter at no additional cost. Below is Veeam announcement in this matter:

Veeam Reporter  has always provided valuable data for capacity planning. With the new Capacity Planning Report Pack, it also does forecasting and modeling for you.

By knowing in advance when additional CPU, memory and storage are needed, you can:

Eliminate service delays
Control costs
Maximize utilization

The Capacity Planning Report Pack is included with Reporter at no additional charge. Download the new version of Reporter  now and get complete visibility of your virtual infrastructure—past, present AND future.

Download Veeam Reporter and the Capacity Planning Report Pack now.

*Also includes support for vSphere 4.1

This year Zenoss are offering a chance to win a trip to VMworld Europe 2010. Zenoss will not only offer a VMworld Europe 2010 pass for the winner, but they are including Airplane Tickets and accommodation.  All you have to do to win is to try their product. Below is thier campaign announcement:

Test drive Zenoss Enterprise between July 30th and September 1st and you could be packing your bags for Copenhagen, Denmark to attend VMworld Europe this October!

It’s easy to enter… all you need to do is:

1. Watch a short introductory video on Zenoss Enterprise and managing Virtual Infrastructures
2. Take the test drive
3. Complete the quick 7 question Try and Fly survey

For the second year, Microsoft will not bring their Hyper-V to VMworld as per reuters.com. The fun part behind it Microsoft claim that VMware does not allow competing products to be shown in VMworld, where VMware deny that. To make the argument more fun, Citrix will be presenting their Xen Desktop in VMworld which compete directly with VMware View. I don’t want to come with a final conclusion about the reason why Microsoft will now bring Hyper-V to VMworld & will leave that for you to research.  Though I thought to share with you the news, so you don’t expect to see Hyper-V in VMworld this year.

Today I have installed VMware ESXi on our Lab blades. While trying to connect to my ESXi 4 server using a vSphere client newly installed on Windows XP SP3 I had been hit by the below two errors:

Error parsing the server “server ip” “clients.xml” file. Login will continue, contact your system administrator.

and after I press OK buttom I was getting the following error:

The type initializer for “VirtualInfrastructure.Utils.HttpWebRequestProxy” threw an exception

Below are actual screen shots of the errors:

OK great!!! you might not care that I hit the same error that you did, but you might care to find out the resolution. Actually after searching the web about the problem I had hit the following VMware forum post that had the answer on the fifth page of it http://communities.vmware.com/thread/211081

Today, I had a call from one of my enterprise customers complaining that he cannot log into Veeam reporter WebAccess Portal. The main error he was getting is:

“Parser Error Message: Could not create Windows user token from the credentials specified in the config file. Error from the operating system ‘Logon failure: unknown user name or bad password.”

Actually the full exact error message is below:

==================Error Start===================

Server Error in ‘/VeeamWebAccess’ Application.
——————————————————————————–

Configuration Error
Description: An error occurred during the processing of a configuration file required to service this request. Please review the specific error details below and modify your configuration file appropriately.

I have taken my VMware Design Exam few days back, which I almost missed as my hotel totally forgot about my wake up call & my mobile (which I use as my alarm) ran out of battery. After taking the exam, I can not agree anymore with others who took the exam, its more of an administration than a design exam. Further, few questions did not have the right answer or did not work correctly. Two question where you do the matching did not have the proper answers rather had duplicate answers, which I have seen many posts about it from up to 1 year back. Its amazing that it has been not functioning for that long and never been fixed.

The VKernel Team has just sent me the below news items in regards of their upcoming chargeback 2.0 release & thought I will share it with all of you. Thanks Tina Dussault for the update.

1. This release extends Chargeback support to both Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware ESX environments while also adding support for mixed chargeback models (allocation vs. usage).  Chargeback 2.0 is the second product from VKernel to support Microsoft Hyper-V following on the launch of the lastest version of VKernel Capacity Analyzer.

2. VKernel is the chargeback partner for Microsoft’s recently released Virtual Machine Manager Self-Service Portal 2.0 which was announced at Microsoft’s Worldwide partner conference this week in Washington DC. The self-service portal is a collection of tools and guidance from Microsoft enabling the creation of private, self-service clouds.

Till today everywhere I looked recommended using RDM over VMFS for performance (when a higher I/O is required), though today while studying for my VMware Design Exam I have got my hand on the “ Performance Characterization of VMFS and RDM Using a SAN” document by VMware. The interesting executive summary of the document is copied up to the letter below:

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Executive Summary:

The main conclusions that can be drawn from the tests described in this study are:

• For random reads and writes, VMFS and RDM yield a similar number of I/O operations per second.

I have earlier mentioned on my blog that I will publish my study guide for VMware Enterprise Administration Exam, but as I have been preparing for my design exam & killed with projects at work. I really had no time to put it all online. Further, it seems these exams are expiring soon. For that I have decided to only publish the most ignored chapters required for the VMware Enterprise Administration exam & VMware Design Exam. I will start with NPIV. When I was preparing for my exam beside the Exam blueprint NPIV was not covered in any study guide including the DSA materials. As I did not use it much in real life I had got a bit of exposure and note taken while reading the chapter about it in the Fibre Channel SAN Configuration Guide which should be almost of sufficient knowledge for both VMware Enterprise Administration Exam & VMware Design Exam as I assume at least. Below are my note of NPIV.

While preparing for my VMware Design Exam, I have stumbled upon this great pdf that document VMware ESX & ESXi connections & ports in details. It even cover the connections & ports for VMware additional components like VMware Update Manager & vCenter Converter.  Although many documents do the same, what got my attention is all this are fitted into one detailed compact image. I though this document will be useful for many others planning to take the exam, or even Virtualization Experts who just want to design their network & adopt for the ports they need to open through firewall. Below is a small foot print of the image. To download the document just hit on the image below.

I have scheduled my VMware VCDX Enterprise Administration Exam on the 1st of June 2010. I was planning to take 10 days off work before the exam for preparation, but I got stuck at a large project which has minimized my study time including travel to 5 days.

I am not sure how many people has heard of VMware Long Distance VMotion, although the concept has been supported since fourth quarter of last year. For that, I thought its worth getting people to know about it. It even get more important when deciding on your cloud computing vendor.

At the moment, many companies offer some form of cloud computing services. Some of these cloud services are really nice, specially the one built on VMware Technology. Features like Memory Page Sharing, Memory Over Commitment, VMotion, Storage VMotion, HA, SRM, Snapshot, VMware Data Recovery & so on has made VMware one of the best platforms if not the best for cloud computing. These features has helped cloud computing vendors to offer a highly available & flexible solution for lower cost.

I know I am late on this one, but as many of you have noticed I have not got a chance to blog much lately. As I have been traveling for training between London & Budapest with a very limited internet access & a very busy schedule for the past month. I am actually still in Budapest at the moment, but I thought I must Congrats all the 2010 vExperts announced by VMware last week. I would like to thank every one who has helped vExpert award to continue in 2010 (Specially John Troyer).

After having a look at VKernel Capacity View few days back, I have decided to give a look at VKernel AppVIEW 1.0. AppView 1.0 is VKernel latest free product. Where VKernel Capacity View looks at hosts, AppVIEW looks at individual application VMs to monitor and diagnose for such things as capacity bottlenecks and resource optimization.

VKernel AppView 1.0 help you monitor how well is your applications are performing on the most important 5 VMs in your Virtual enviornment. Limiting you to monitor the application on 5 VMs might seems limiting, but hey it suppose to be for your most important VMs & remember its a free product so it should have a limitation.