Virtualization Team

When ever I attend a VMware presentation, one of the most common question “How would we handle our USB or parralel licenses dongles in VMware ESX.” Are they supported? Can I get them to work some how? What make the question more critical that most presenters are from a sale or pre-sale background and does not have the clear answer. The real answer to the question, yes its workable but you might need some third party utility to get the required setup to run. Some good resources to get you started are below:

VMware ESX Server Using AnywhereUSB to Connect USB Devices

VMware esx21admin_modvm_parallel_running

USB Device Support within VMware ESX 3.x and ESXi

It might be the time for you to upgrade your VMware ESX servers to VMware 3.5U3 and Virtual Center 3.5U4.

You might even just want to upgrade to any version of VMware ESX & vCenter 3.5. Then this guide linked to below is all you need. It has a great step by step instruction of the process & better its provided by the solution Vendor VMWare .

VMware ESX & Virtual Center Upgrade guide

You might wake up for a bad day after a power outage or a storage failure. You thought it was over, after you had succeeded to bring all your machines back up and running. In few minutes you found out that some of your virtual machines are missing. After a small investigation you found out that your VMware Datastores (VMFS) are empty when you try to browse them from VMware vCenter or VI client. If you face this problem there is a big chance that your VMFS Partition table for these LUNs or disks are missing.

To Check Your VMware ESX server VMFS Partition table follow the following procedure:

Redhat has announced an interesting change in their virtualization strategy. They seems to dump Xen for KVM in their upcoming releases. This will be a happy news for a lot of open source lovers. As Citrix & Microsoft are controlling the way Xen is evolving, they would rather a real open source alternative. Redhat has a good announcement found at Red Hat Sets Its Virtualization Agenda clearing up the confusion of their Virtualization Strategy after they had obtained Qumranet in the last quarter of 2008.

A brief of the planned changes quoted from Redhat annoucement is below:

Finally back home . Don’t get me wrong Cannes was great, though nothing like being back home.

OK for people who did not get to join us in Cannes, I had for them a free ticket for the replay .

I wish I could afford to give our visitors a VMworld pass for free, but I have not been making that much money yet. Here I will make up for the tickets, by sharing with you the links for the top 10 VMware VMworld 2009 Vids including the CEO Keynotes & the closing . So you will feel like you were there with us. Below are the long waited links .

VMware VMworld 2009 General Keynotes Videos

After the News that the bomb had been launched by Virtualization.info:

http://www.virtualization.info/2009/02/citrix-xenserver-is-now-free-xencenter.html

Citrix has officially released their enterprise version for free check out the announcement at Citrix XenServer Enterprise for free:

“First of all Citrix is releasing for free the Enterprise Edition of XenServer.

This is not a scaled down, limited version of the Hypervisor. From the end of March on, there will be only one edition of XenServer which will be free.

Secondarily, Citrix is giving away for free with a remarkable number of XenServer enterprise features, including the Enterprise Console to manage multiple hosts (XenCenter), the live VM migration (XenMotion) technology, the resource sharing (Resource Pools) technology and the enterprise storage management technology. “