Virtualization Team

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.

I have a great news today from VMware. They have released the new version of VMware Site Recovery Manager SRM which will support VMware vSphere. This release of SRM had been long waited by many of us who upgraded, or already planning to upgrade to vSphere. I thought I will share the good news with every one.

The support for vSphere is not everything, but another great feature of the new SRM is the ability to support multiple source to a single target storage, which was not supported by earlier releases of VMware.

Another long waited feature for SRM is the support for NFS Datastores. Yes, finally NFS is supported by VMware Site Recovery Manager.

I have been hearing many IT Professionals on many forums on the web complaining that their DHCP Server which is setup at the parent partition of their MS Windows 2008 Hyper-V Server is not working. Further more many of them has reported an error similar to the below one in their error logs:

1041:
The DHCP service is not servicing any DHCPv4 clients because none of the
active network interfaces have statically configured IPv4 addresses, or
there are no active interfaces.

The first thing I would like to bring to these administrators attention & to everyone else trying to setup any services or application in the parent partition of Hyper-V to consider avoiding that if possible at all cost. As its not recommended and almost not supported to use the parent partition for serving roles & services beside the Hyper-V role.

I was reading Manlio Vecchiet article “Microsoft’s new VDI licensing: VDI Suites” can be found here. I believe its quite misleading, but hey fair enough being a part of the Microsoft Marketing Team. I had left a comment on the article, but as it seems it had never made it on there. I thought I will post it on my blog & publish my opinion of the article.

It’s funny how Microsoft Virtualization Campaign is completely built on the word Free & lower Cost. I had never thought Microsoft main priority was ever to only produce a cheaper solution not a better one.

VMware seems to always come up with innovations that blow people mind. One of the latest VMware innovations I was checking out is VMware Mobile Virtualization.

Let’s see how VMware define Mobile Virtualization. As per VMware, Mobile Virtualization(MVP) is a thin layer of software that is embedded on a mobile phone to decouple the applications and data from the underlying hardware. It is optimized to run efficiently on low power consuming and memory constrained mobile phones. The MVP currently supports a wide range of real-time and rich operating systems including Windows CE 5.0 and 6.0, Linux 2.6.x, Symbian 9.x, eCos, µITRON NORTi and µC/OS-II.

As many VMware ESX monitoring tools are hitting the market place, and with the tend of these tools being dependent on SNMP (example: Starwind Free VM Monitor for VMware ESX), the more I am getting the question on how can I enable SNMP on my VMware ESX Server.. The instruction below will cover how to enable SNMP on VMware ESX (Note: VMware ESXi 3.5 does not support SNMP queries.).

To enable SNMP on VMware ESX Server 3.5:

1. Login to the console as root
2. Open snmpd.conf file with your favorite editor (Usually you can find snmpd.conf  in /etc/snmpd) and add “rocommunity xxxx” where xxxx is your read-only community string).

SolarWind has released a new VMware ESX Monitoring tool called VM Monitor. The new tool can monitor the status & utilizaiton of your ESX Servers as well your Virtual Machines. SolareWind VM Monitor uses the SNMP Service on VMware ESX to monitor your enviornment. As VMware ESXi does not support SNMP queries,  it’s still not supported by SolarWind VM Monitor. In order for SolarWind to work with your VMware ESX you will have to enable SNMP on your ESX hosts. A good instruction on enabling SNMP on VMware ESX Host can be found at: VMware ESX How to enable SNMP.

Below you will find a good video of the SolarWind VM Monitor in action, please note the video cover a bit of SolarWind Orion product which is not a free product.

I know many Virtualization Consultants who all are still wondering where is the Intel Nehalem processor in the VMware Capacity Planner. The Nehalem processor has already hit the market more than 6 months back, VMware still has not update their Capacity Planner to include it. We all know that the Nehalem processor is providing a great performance & efficiency enhancement comparing to the prior Intel processors & this change should be taken into the consideration When doing Capacity Planning.

This article title say “Sony VAIO laptops disabled Intel VT“, but what should that mean to you. It should mean the world to a lot of us. It should mean think twice trice before you buy a Sony VAIO laptop, due to the amount of limitation that come with disabling Intel VT. Ok, let’s see some of the most obvious limitation:

1- Sony VAIO Laptops will not support Windows 7 XP mode, which require enabling hardware Virtualization:

Windows 7 will be offering a great feature which is called XP mode, which will allow you to run most of XP applications on Windows 7 without having to worry about application compatibility with Windows 7. As Windows 7 XP mode requires Hardware Virtualization which Sony has decided to disable on their laptops. This means if you are upgrading to windows 7 then Sony VAIO laptop might not be for you.

I want all of you to look at this logo & try to guess which company logo is this .

Ah if you rather watch this post as a video instead of reading it check the video below else keep reading.

I am sure this logo is familiar to most of us. At least I am sure 75% of you had already guessed whose logo is this . Do you think you really know whose logo is this? Well then scroll down to see the answer. If you missed it or got it right the first time then please leave me a commend & a feed back of this small puzzle .

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vSphere Virtual Center Linked Mode Prerequisites:

Well, yes this article has two headers or titles. Guess what they are almost identical.

I have seen “Error 28039. Setup cannot join vCenter Server to the linked mode group” all over the net & without any one posting resolution for it. hmmmm, how did I find out about this error and what made me looking for resolutions, well I had faced this same ugly error in my own lab. The resolution for it was nothing more than following the pre-requisite to vSphere Virtual Center Linked Mode which most people ignore. Below is the pre-requisite that you must follow for a successful installation of vCenter Linked mode & I will highligh the mostly missed one.
All the requirements for standalone vCenter Server systems apply to Linked Mode systems. In addition, to the following requirements:

Many of you have already heard about the new VMware vNetwork Distributed switch. It has been a really great innovation by VMware. I believe most of us has already learned something about its benefit like:

1- Simplify Virtual Machine Networking: As you get to create one switch per cluster & create the policy across all your ESX hosts at once instead of repeating the process endlessly.

2- Enhance Virtual Machine Networking:

• VMware vNetwork Distributed Switch maintains network runtime state for VMs as they move across multiple hosts, enabling inline monitoring and centralized firewall services.
• It provides a  framework for monitoring and maintaining the security of virtual machines as they move from physical server to physical server

If you don’t know what is VMware EVC or you need to find out more about it, please look at my last post VMware EVC enhanced VMotion Compatibility enable VMware VMotion across CPU generations

Ok, if you had read that and now wondering how to get it setup without having to shutdown your virtual machines. Then this small tip is for you.

As you know & I had mentioned that in my previous post on this topic that VMware will request you to shutdown all the virtual machines you have running on the cluster you want to enable VMware EVC for. To avoid having to shutdown your virtual machines what you can do is to create a temp cluster with few temp servers on it & VMotion your VMs to these servers. Enable VMWare EVC on your evacuated production cluster. Then again VMotion the Virtual Machines back to your original production cluster.

Everyone who had been using VMware for a while, would appreciate VMware VMotion. Actually VMware VMotion have always been a distinguished feature of VMware ESX servers. Despite of VMotion has always been a great feature, people using it at earlier stages used to have a tough time when having to use it across different CPU generation. That meant companies had to actually put similar hardware server in the same cluster, to guarantee that VMotion work smoothly. This was not possible at all the time, and was a tough call for implementers as they had to cheat masking manually in order to avoid VMotion not accepting to run between different CPU genrations.