Virtualization Team

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.

Find out how this cute lady nightmares Vanished using VMware . watch the video below to find out just that:

Do you still have nightmares? or did VMware or virtualization helped you get rid of one, please let us know about it in the comment below.

Lol, Take a look & try to imagine how VMware would look like if it was an Action Movie. Check out the video below to find out:

I hope you enjoyed it, please leave a comment of what do u think of this movie.

In a very interesting article by Jeffrey Schawartz in Readmondmag.com, has published an interesting news about Microsoft’s decision – “unthinkable” until a few days ago – MS “open” more than 20,000 lines of code to the Linux community under the license GPLv2 (General Public License version 2).

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The code, published on Monday, includes three device drivers that will allow any business enterprise or any distribution of Linux community to use this device in a virtual machine within the stack virtualization of Microsoft Hyper-V battery.

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This would be the first time Microsoft opened its code to the Linux community, free of any licensing or patent restrictions under the GPLv2 license.

Citrix Systems, Inc. has just made available to the general public, Citrix Essentials for HyperV – Express Edition version, for free.

The new version of Express Edition is available for immediate download and includes Citrix StorageLink technology. With StorageLink, Windows administrators can dramatically simplify storage management.

The Express Edition version of Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V is designed specifically for IT professionals in Windows environments that are in the early stages of adoption of Hyper-V.

Express Edition Citrix Essentials for Hyper-V supports up to two servers and a Hyper-V cabin storage.

This version can be upgraded easily to the Enterprise version ($ 1500) or Platinum ($ 3000) which include dynamic server provisioning and management through automated workflow orchestration.

It seems to me many people are facing the same ugly error when they try to convert a physical server to a virtual server using VMware Consolidation Planning tool. The error usually get after the tool has finished annalyzing the physical machine & it was deemed ‘Ready for consolidation’ with Confidence ‘high’.

When the user select ‘Plan Consolidation’, select the server, and click on ‘Consolidate’, they get the famous error message, “A general system error occurred: Ufad server is not running.”

The image below show the error:

As a lot of people seems to stumble by this every day, I have decided to discuss the way I usually resolve this problem.

The Question Below was received by giammin:

As we have noticed that the number of our readers have been increasing & the amount of questions we had been getting through e-mail had increased. We have decided to allow people to post all their virtualization questions on this page & we will easier answer it directly in here in the comment or create a post with the solution.

We hope to be able to help more people this way. So just post your virtualization question in the comments & we will try to get back to you on it as soon as possible.

Only after a bit over a month of Oracle acquiring Virutal Iron, they have to ditches the product. That mean customers who had already bought Virtual Iron or planning to buy it will be left in the dark waiting for a savior. It seems VMware has been well aware of the situation & prepared to be these customers savior. VMware has already even released a full guide on how to move from the Virtual Iron platform to VMware vSphere without a lot of hassle. They had been as well pushing their sales forces to educate Virtual Iron customer on making the decision of moving to VMware & how to facilatate the movement. If you are a Virtual Iron customer & planning to move to VMware, so you might be curious on how to do so below is the exact instructions as listed by VMware guide & hope it will safe some one from getting fired for the wrong decision in the current bad economy:

Offline VMware Capacity Planner:

I have mostly done online VMware Capacity Planner as most customers usually don’t mind it, though when I started offering VMware Capacity Planner for Banks & Ministries that’s when Offline VMware Capacity Planner came handy. Many of the companies & ministries mind you sending data online directly, where they are OK with you sending it after they inspect it. As VMware Capacity Planner allow you to queue all your inventory data & performance data on the Capacity Planner system and upload it from another system or at another time that problem can be over come by what I like to call Offline VMware Capacity Planner. Although you will need to use the same methodology if the system running the capacity planner does not have an internet & you want to upload the data at a later time using another machine with internet access. The procedure of Offline VMware Capactiy Planner is below as documented by VMware KB#1896:

If you are as paranoid with redundancy as my team & I are, then entering the hostnames & IPs of all the server in a cluster into the VMware host file is a must. As your VMware HA is dependant on your servers being able to resolve the names of itself & other ESX server in the cluster, the DNS get to play a major role in HA. What if DNS fail? As many customers are using Microsoft DNS as their primary means of DNS, there is a chance it will fail a day or another. Would you like a way to ensure that your HA will work even if your DNS fail? then Adding these records to the host files of each of the ESXi server in the cluster will do the trick. What if you did not even have a DNS & still want to implement HA & other feature that depend on name resolution, then again adding the records to the host file is the solution.

Did the title bring your attention? Have you heard that one of the main reasons for VMware ESXi was to get rid of the service console? Are you sure there is no console in VMware ESXi? The true is there is still a very tiny console in VMware ESXi, though it has way smaller foot print than the one found in the ESX version. In addition, the usage of the VMware ESXi Console Access is not supported unless if instructed by VMware to do so. Please use this tip wisely & don’t try to do wild changes using your VMware ESXi console as that is not supported. Yeah, again I would repeat its not supported .

It had been asked so often lately, if VMware vSphere support SRM & VMware View yet. I had even got calls from customers who tried to integrate the two together. The VMware statement is quite clear in this regard, both VMware Site Recovery Manager(SRM) & VMware View are not supported yet by VMWare vSphere 4.0. They will be supported by sometime in the 2nd half of this year. To check the support matrix & when its going to happen for most VMware product with vSphere, please check out the below document:

VMware vSphere 4.0 Software Compatibility Matrix

I have just came across a video of Microsoft trying to bust VMware top Myths, but what is funny to me it seems Microsoft had just busted them selfes in the video than anything else. The link to the video is below:

http://www.microsoft.com/video/en/us/details/f8c3314f-c82d-4f8d-8b19-6a59733670f8

I have seen Gabe reply on his blog at his Gabes virtualization Blog which seems to be a great busting to this video. Below is what Gabe is saying on his blog or please read it directly on Gabe blog at http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com/?p=445. Please give credit to Gabes & read this on his blog .

============== Directly from Gabes Virtualization Blog ===========

In the past few weeks, I had been hit by many calls of many of my colleagues & customers being hit by the following error when trying to configure VMware ESXi HA:

“cmd addnode failed for secondary node: /opt/vmware/aam/bin/ft_startup failed to complete within three minutes”

After investigating the error for sometime & searching on the internet I found many misleading trial and error solutions for this error around Google results. The resolution which seems to work for everyone of my colleagues & customers is below.

1- Disable HA for the affected cluster

2- Delete the User Worlds Swap file called uwswap from all the nodes in the problematic cluster.

3- Enable HA for the affected cluster again.