Virtualization Team

Note: If you have read this article earlier, please read this revised version of it as after getting multiple comments from different readers I have noticed that although the over all statement of the article was correct the calculation example was not fully accurate so I have gone through the Microsoft Licensing and the comments all over again and accommodated for this in my revised version.

In this post, I will show you a secret that you need to know if you are already using VMware vSphere or if you are planning to buy VMware vSphere. One call to Microsoft to recalculate your Windows/SQL licenses can give you a licenses cut on Microsoft licenses that will pay for VMware vSphere Enterprise Plus and still save you tons of money a side. That means you don’t show management that you got vSphere Enterprise Plus for no Extra cost, but as well saved them a huge amount on Microsoft Licenses renewal. I was going to name this post:

Lately vShield seems to gain much popularity due to all the security benefits it offer in a virtual environment. Further, the security concern of merging 10s and (maybe 100s in the near future) of VMs on the same host seems just to push the demand for similar security capabilities in the Enterprise.  It seems there is a lot of confusion on which version of vSphere you require to run vShield products. This has been specially raised up with vShield Zone being a part of vSphere Advanced Edition and above, & people assuming the rest of the vShield Family will only work with vSphere Advanced and above. To be honest I had the question about a week back from one of our partners, and I did not know the answer and was trying to look it up on the net. Though I had no official answer in any of our documentation even internal one but found multiple blogs that posted different answers. Though my colleague @wibrahim had an e-mail from our security team with the official answer that I would like to share it with you. First thanks to @wibrahim for sharing the info, & being kind enough to take the time and share the original e-mail with me.

I have order the “vSphere 4.1 HA and DRS Technical Deepdive” by @DuncanYB most famous by 007 & @FrankDenneman about 3 months back on Amazon. I received the book about one month after ordering due to the distance the book had to travel I guess, although I paid for shipping more than I paid for the book. I can not blame the authors for the long shipping time, as I had this same problem with Amazon with every book I have ever ordered.  So if you are in rush for the book, then you might want to look at buying the e-book edition at even a cheaper price than the paper back. This was not available at the time I ordered, though hey having the paper back was worth the wait.

I have been lately seeing many tenders in my region that include vCloud Director, but the funny part most of them were purposing vSphere Enterprise Edition. This has alarmed me as I always go back to our partners and ensure they are aware of the features they will lose in vCloud Director when using it with Standard  Switches rather than vDistributed Switches. The sad part, I have discovered most of our partners in this region at least were not aware of it so I thought I will document it in this blog post. Further there is an official VMware KB (KB Article: 1026328) found at:  Virtual switch support for VMware vCloud Director that clearly state: “Although it is supported, VMware recommends that you do not use vSwitches” <== in this statement the KB recommend using Distributed Switches with vCloud Director over Standard switches which is only included in the Enterprise Plus Edition. I just wanted to make sure its clear that its not only me who is saying so.

As many organization today are in the process for moving from VMware ESX to to ESXi, it has been important to VMware to educate its partners & customers of the process and difference.  For that VMware is offering a free web training “Free Transition to ESXi essential training” to everyone who want to learn more about ESXi. The training can be found at:   Free Transition to ESXi essential training Link . I hope you wall enjoy this free training. Free as in free Beer .

Ah below are the description of the training as officially was posted on the VMware site:

Title: Transition to ESXi Essentials

Summary

- Format: Self-Paced

- Length: 4 Hours

As more and more companies offer different way of doing cloud computing, the concept it self is getting fuzzier to the consumer. Further, after VMware has prompted the idea of Hybrid Cloud Computing, many other companies have copied the road map as usual and started to talk about it as being the first to promote it. The funny part is when you look about how to move workload between the Private & Public cloud which was one of the matters discussed in VMware original Hyprid Cloud plan, you will find not much of an answer or plan at most vendors. VMware VCloud Connector was the first part of the answer to this strategy, but not yet the full solution. Things that are coming in the future should enable the workload to move across the Private and Public Cloud with zero downtime to enable a real Hybrid Cloud. This will require a long distance vmotion to work across datacenters. Today many solutions are out there to enable VMware Long Distance VMotion between datacenters, & it get me wondering how thing will look like when these are fully integrated with vCloud Director/vCloud Connector out of the box in the future. That seems to give us a real Hybrid Cloud Computing that we were talking about.

Are you a user of Quora, FourSquare or Reddit? If so then you might have already experienced the Amazon EC2 Public Cloud service failure. Being a user of two of the above services FourSquare & Reddit I can tell you they were affected on the April 21st, 2011  for over 20 hours for sure. Ok, so what has happened? All these companies are utilizing the Public Cloud offering from Amazon EC2. While things have been good at Amazon EC2 these companies has enjoyed the service, but when someone has decided to trip the wire at the Amazon EC2 at 1:41 a.m PDT April 21st at an AWS (Amazon Web Services) data center in Northern Virginia 100s of companies were affected, but the affect has spread to millions of users as many popular services like FourSquare, Quora, & Reddit has been affected by this major service interruption which has lasted for more than 30 hours. Further, many of these companies has lost a good amount of money due to this interruption that could not be recovered for.

For all of you vExperts out there I am sure you have already received an e-mail from John Troyer informing you to fill the forum for VMware vExpert 2011. The nomination/registration process for the VMware vExpert 2011 program has already started, & the last day for registration will be: May 6th, 2011. If you have been a vExpert for 2010, then make sure you fill the required forum to be considered for vExpert 2011 as being a vExpert 2010 does not automatically register you for vExpert 2011. Further, I have noticed the registration form for VMware vExpert 2011 require you to fill much more info about your actual contribution than it did in 2010. Further, even if you nominate someone he will still have to fill the form him self. It seems the vExpert 2011 criteria will be tougher than vExpert 2010.

While VMware Compatibility Guide has always been quite helpful in finding the compatibility between different part of the virtual infrastructure. Vmware are currently working on releasing a next generation of the tool which can provide more details and better search options. You can start utilizing the tool by trying it out in beta at: http://partnerweb.vmware.com/comp_guide2/search.php

Enjoy the ride, & make sure to take the survey to help the development team enhance it with features you require. Make the difference & contribute!!!

During my blogging for the past 3 years, I have never been contacted about using the wrong upper & lower case incorrectly in the product name. Though the VCE Vblock^TM Infrastructure Platform was the exception. Two days ago, I have put a simple post about VCE Vblock Platform at http://www.vblocksolutions.com/2011/04/20/the-misleading-reality-behind-vce-vblock/

I have done a small non intentional repeated mistake at the blog post by using the word vBlock rather than Vblock, which is incorrect. It seems the way most virtualization vendors specially VMware has written their products has got me as Vblock does not follow it. Example: vCenter, vSphere, vCloud, vRanger, … ect all of them had a v in small case where the second letter is what capitalizes. Carrying the same method on vblock it would have been vBlock, but after using that on my post 2 days back & being slapped already by 5 different VCE Employee I have definitely learned that you have to spell it as Vblock with an upper case for the V and lower case for the rest of the letters.

Infoworld has published a quite interesting comparison between Citrix, Microsoft, Red Hat, & VMware at  Virtualization shoot-out: Citrix, Microsoft, Red Hat, and VMware. Its quite detailed and the methodologies and comparison basis was documented clearly which make it worth going through.

Although I agree with the comparison to a great degree I still had few comments to post on it. First of all let look at the great news the article has brought:

- VMware are the leaders when it comes to Advanced/Creative features.

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.