Virtualization Team

I know many of you out there want to practice on many VMware products specially vSphere & would like to build your own lab but without breaking the bank.

I have been able to build my own Home Lab for less than $600 buying the parts in Kuwait, which probably end up even cheaper on your side. Further, I thought I will share my VMware ESX White Box Configuration for others who want to build their own ESX white box, but they don’t want to risk it will not work. This configuration has been tested and it work perfectly with both VMware vSphere ESX 4.0/ESX 4.1/ and even ESX 4.1 U1.

Cut it short below is my Lab ESX white Box configuration:

My last 10 days were a trip to ….. I had been contacted by our certifications team and been informed that the dead line for the VCDX4 defense held in UK in may is March 21st. That e-mail just had started an alarm in my head as only 10 days was left, as I was still missing the VCAP-DCD & submitting a design to be eligible for attending the defense in May. Further, I was stuck with many customers proposals, sizing, & high level designs for that week. Being me I have decided to shoot for that dead line & that when an 18 hours work days started. I took two days and the weekend off & finished customers work that was in hand in the first 3 days & completed the design update from VI3 to vSphere in the first 7 days. The 3 days left I used them to cramp as much as possible of the VCAP-DCD materials that had thousands of pages to go through!!

Working for VMware has always been filled with surprises since the first day I joined. I really believe we have one of the greatest engineering departments out there. I mean when your engineering team create a plugin that allow vCenter to Manager Hyper-V in their own spare time, it just get you really proud to work for such a company. Before I get into details about what is going on, I must thank our great engineering team for their super dedication.

VMware has finally released its Hyper-V management tool as a “fling” (unsupported vCenter Plug in, personal projects built by VMware Engineers in their spare time), now available at:

http://labs.vmware.com/flings/xvp

Here is what our Engineering Team have to say about it:

I am still no vCloud expert at the moment, although I am learning my way through. This post will not cover how to carry out the installation of vShield or vCloud Director. I am just planning to bring the message of these products being compatible together. if what you are looking for is the instruction of installing them or integrating them together, you might want to visit my Colleague Hany Micheal blog at Hypervizor.com. The reason I am putting this brief post here, there  is too much of confusion if vCloud Director is compatible with the different vShields products.

vSphere 4.1 Update 1 has been released on Feb 10th. Below is what’s included in this update:

:

VMware ESX/ESXi Enhancements:

• Support for up to 160 logical processors
• Inclusion of additional drivers (ESX 4.1 Update 1 includes the 3ware SCSI 2.26.08.036vm40 and Neterion vxge 2.0.28.21239-p3.0.1.2 drivers, which were provided as a separate download in earlier releases.)
• Enablement of Intel Trusted Execution Technology (ESXi only)
• Additional guest operating system support (ESX 4.1 Update 1 adds support for RHEL 6, RHEL 5.6, SLES 11 SP1 for VMware, Ubuntu 10.10, and Solaris 10 Update 9 guest operating systems.)
• Bug and security fixes (For more information on Bug fixes included in this release, you can check vSphere 4.1 Update 1 Bug Fixes

Today, I have been lucky to get the chance to attend the London 2011 VMUG. It has been arranged by a great team of VMware enthusiasts (Martyn Storey, Mark Stockham, Alan Renouf, Scott Vessey, Gabrie van Zanten, Simon Long, Chris Dearden). The arrangement was great & I would say over 100 people were in the room & participating in the sessions. Alan has pulled a great session about PowerCLI, which I expected from the PowerCli legend. I am glad I attended the PowerCli session as that got me started. I am really thankful for the UK VMUG team to allow me to attend while they were over-booked.

Few quick interested notes I heard during the session and might be of interested to others:

I have been asked lately if NPIV could be used to attach a tape library to a VM, & as attaching tape libraries to a VM has never been well documented. I have decided to write a small post about it. I don’t want to be a smart A**, but I will start by asking why would you want to attach a tape to a VM? Why not utilize VMware Storage API for backup & move on with it. As any method that can be utilized to connect a tape Drive/ Tape library to a VM running on ESX will compromise on many feature & introduce many restrictions to your environment. That have been said let’s see what options are available & what option is just confusing people.

As many of you know VMware has included VMotion in vSphere Essential Plus 4.1, where it was not included in vSphere Essential Plus 4.0

I have been getting the question lately, how do I obtain VMotion in this case if I have a valid support. Do I have to upgrade or change my license?

The easy answer is all you have to do is upgrade your software to vSphere 4.1. The license key you used with vSphere Essential Plus 4.0 will still be valid and usable with vSphere 4.1 & in turn will provide you with the VMotion feature, without the need to do anything on the license.

I thought its worth mentioning a bit about what to upgrade:

Lately many questions about VMware Site Recovery Manager Licensing has been raising up specially ones related to VMware vSphere Essential, vSphere Essential Plus, and other acceleration kits. Getting answer to these were always a hassle to find till I found this magical document with answers to many of these. You can find the document  at: Site Recovery Manager Pricing Licensing FAQ – Q409.pdf

I have decided to post the questions & answers of this document on my blog due to their importance & the huge demand for them, where this document is not well indexed online & quite hard to find. You can download the document above & use it offline, or look online below for the answer you require (The documents have points I have not included as they seemed well-known to me):

I believe one of the greatest addition to VMware View 4.5 is Location Based Printing. I have the question just popping up right and left lately (3 customers just this week), on how to get VMware View users to print to their nearest printers when they are using virtual desktops. In physical environment this was possible by applying computer policies, but when using terminal services or VDI the device used to access terminal service or Virtual Desktop might not be on the domain if even exist when using Zero Clients. Further, the user might access the same VM(Same computer name) from different locations, which make the use of Computer Policy alone not applicable.

VMware has just releases a new Official VMware KB Mobile App for Android & iPhone to keep VMware customers up to date on new KBs, news & so on all the time.

VMware KB app gives you the ability to:

• Search the Knowledgebase
• Read the Support Insider blog for important updates
• Catch our twitter feed from @vmwarekb (great for its real-time stream of new published KB content)
• Watch VMware KBTV (how-to videos)

Below is a great picture of the new Official VMware KB APP for Android & iPhone:

The KB App is definitely free of charge & can be found at: Get the VMware KB mobile app now!

I can see the above title bringing a lot of our competitors to read my blog for the next few days. I know many of them are already monitoring it daily, & as many of them still believe that there is still no upgrade path from our vSphere Essentials Kit & vSphere Essentials plus Kit might think I am shooting my self in the foot. I would love to disappoint them hard this time & point out that since vSphere has came out and the upgrade path from vSphere Essentials Kit & vSphere Essentials plus Kit has been available!!!!

I have just been assigned to assist one of our partners design a VDI environment using VMware View 4.5 with 5000+ Virtual Desktop. At this number of desktops every small bit has to be counted for while putting the design out. Some of the info required for the design was not ready in my mind nor obviously documented on the web. For that I had to contact our PSO team, & they have shared the answers with me. I am really thankful to the bright consultant who helped me with these info (requested not to mention his name so I will respect that). As these tips were not easy to find I thought I will share it with all of you.

For those who know me closely have already heard the news, for those who did not then yes I have just started to carry the VMware badge beginning of this month. Hmmm, I have started holding the VMware badge virtually I guess as I have not been handed that yet, but I have started as a VMware employee beginning of this month. My experience with the team has been great so far. Every one is interested in helping me adjust to the new role.

Although this news has been released for over a month now, I believe it was not pushed hard enough. Now its the time for it to make it to my blog. After reading this post, cheaper can no more be an execuse to not choose VMware the leading Virtualization product for your datacenter. Its no more the argument of just VMware being more cost effective, but a very price competetive at the initial cost. VMware has just moved VMotion to its Standard edition. That means the competitors will be offering their customers at best the equivelant of VMware Standard edition. Further, with the low pricing of VMware standard edition its no longer more expensive than the competition.