I have scheduled my VMware VCDX Enterprise Administration Exam on the 1st of June 2010. I was planning to take 10 days off work before the exam for preparation, but I got stuck at a large project which has minimized my study time including travel to 5 days.
I am not sure how many people has heard of VMware Long Distance VMotion, although the concept has been supported since fourth quarter of last year. For that, I thought its worth getting people to know about it. It even get more important when deciding on your cloud computing vendor.
At the moment, many companies offer some form of cloud computing services. Some of these cloud services are really nice, specially the one built on VMware Technology. Features like Memory Page Sharing, Memory Over Commitment, VMotion, Storage VMotion, HA, SRM, Snapshot, VMware Data Recovery & so on has made VMware one of the best platforms if not the best for cloud computing. These features has helped cloud computing vendors to offer a highly available & flexible solution for lower cost.
I know I am late on this one, but as many of you have noticed I have not got a chance to blog much lately. As I have been traveling for training between London & Budapest with a very limited internet access & a very busy schedule for the past month. I am actually still in Budapest at the moment, but I thought I must Congrats all the 2010 vExperts announced by VMware last week. I would like to thank every one who has helped vExpert award to continue in 2010 (Specially John Troyer).
After having a look at VKernel Capacity View few days back, I have decided to give a look at VKernel AppVIEW 1.0. AppView 1.0 is VKernel latest free product. Where VKernel Capacity View looks at hosts, AppVIEW looks at individual application VMs to monitor and diagnose for such things as capacity bottlenecks and resource optimization.
VKernel AppView 1.0 help you monitor how well is your applications are performing on the most important 5 VMs in your Virtual enviornment. Limiting you to monitor the application on 5 VMs might seems limiting, but hey it suppose to be for your most important VMs & remember its a free product so it should have a limitation.
Checking out Vkernel Capacity View has been on my todo list for over a month, as I have been exhausted at work lately. Though now that I have given it a fast try, I think its really worth the effort. Vkernel Capacity View has a great dashboard that give you a laser vision sight of your Virtual enviornment Capacity usage. Vkernel Capacity View Dashboard has been one of the things that had really attracted me to the product. Below you can see an image of the dashboard.
VKernel Capacity View can provide information in two main areas:
1- Capacity Alerting
Capacity View collects CPU, memory and storage allocations and utilization levels. It then analyzes this data to provide you with desktop Capacity alerts concerning:
I am sure many of you have been looking for a comprehensive comparison between VMware ESX 4.0 & MS Windows Server 2008 R2 Hyper-V. I am sure you have found plenty of them with one problem they all were mostly sponsored by one of the vendors. Many of us were ready for a real independent comparison. If you were, then I have a great news for you. ITComparison.com has just released an updated version of their famous Hyper-V & VMware comparison. If you are in a rush just go and check it out at: VMware ESX 4.0 vs MS Hyper-V R2.
Few days back, I had the chance to evaluate Hyper9 Virtual Environment Optimization known by Hyper9 VEO. Actually as most of our internal testing equipment is currently out of the office, the guys at Hyper9 was kind enough to provide me with a SandBox on their side to test the product. Below is my feedback based on my experience with their sandbox.
In order to improve VMware Snapshots & enhance them further, VMware has just published a Snapshot feedback to its users. The return of the feedback will be used to guide future development of VMware Snapshots & enhance it depending on your feedback. If you believe VMware Snapshot technology is in need for any enhancement its the time for you to get your voice heard. I have just filled my VMware Snapshots feedback, so file yours now 
. Below is the link to the feedback forum:
The URL to this survey is: http://www.surveymethods.com/EndUser.aspx?B094F8E2B1F2E0E6B6
Thanks to Duncan Epping, as I have got the above info on his blog at: http://www.yellow-bricks.com/2010/04/13/feedback-on-vmware-snapshots/ & thought its worth sharing to help VMware improve its snapshots. So please take your shot at it. It will not take you more than 15 minutes.
In the past few weeks, I was lucky enough to get the chance to look over many third party monitoring solutions for VMware vSphere. I have decided its worth covering few of them on my blog. I will start today with Veeam nworks MP Microsoft Ops Mgr.
Earlier last year, I had a look at Veeam monitor which I thought of being a very basic performance monitoring tool though I expected that from its price tag (I have not yet tried Veeam Montir 4 & that is on my to do list). Though Veeam nworks MP Microsoft Ops Mgr has changed my view of Veeam when it comes to monitoring. Its a 360 degree full VMware monitoring solution & I would definitely rate it as an enterprise ready. I believe Veeam should revamp their Veeam monitor to match Veeam nworks MP Microsoft Ops Mgr.
As many of my customers are still on VMware ESX4 & not yet upgraded to ESX4U1, I get many complains about virtual machine console timeout error from web access for non administrator users. Yeah, I have already pushed an upgrade recommendation, but as usual most companies take more time approving the change request than to carry out the change. If you have VMware ESX4U1 & you are facing a problem & hit this page, then please ignore this post as this bug was fixed in update 1. If you want to read the VMware KB on this issue you should check out:
Accessing the console of a Windows virtual machine through Web Access in ESX 4.0 times out
I am sorry if this is too obvious for some of you, but it seems not obvious to most of my customers. Every few days I get the following question from my customers, which I will try to briefly answer in this post.
Unfortunately, unlike most other VMware feature the VMware vCenter Converter does not have any obvious shortcut in vCenter. To start vCenter converter in Virtual Center you will need to follow the below steps:
VMware ESX host can disconnect from VirtualCenter & have a problem connecting to it again for many reasons. Below I will cover few ways to diagnose the problem, few common resolutions to this issue.
In these cases usually the first thing you want to do is to log on through ssh, vcli, or directly on the server console & check the following log files for errors:
Vmkernel – /var/log/vmkernel
Vmkernel Warnings – /var/log/vmkwarning
ESX Server host agent log – /var/log/vmware/hostd.log
Service Console – /var/log/messages
VirtualCenter agent – /var/log/vmware/vpx
Note: it would be great if you get to know what each of the above log files is for. VMwareWolf has a great post explaining these log files that can be found at: http://www.vmwarewolf.com/which-esx-log-file/
Veeam Backup & replication is one of my personal favorite DR solution for VMware, specially when SAN replication is not an option. Though just as with any other backup or Disaster Recovery solution you will have to test your backup or disaster recovery plan regularly. As Veeam Backup & Replication does not include a button for testing the DR, many people don’t test their DR or get to restart the full replication over & over again after every DR test. For that I have decided to document my Veeam Replica test procedure & share it with you to save you the time & ensure you can test your DR as often as you like without affecting your production or replication.
After installing or upgrading to VMware ESX 4, the Guest operating system’s memory usage might be overestimated on Intel systems that support EPT technology or AMD systems that support RVI technology. This issue might cause the memory alarms in vCenter to go off spuriously even if the guest is not actively accessing a lot of memory.
I have today visited another customer who had a problem that their virtual machines are always reporting a very high memory usage in vCenter while their OS task manager & TOP command in Linux machines were showing a very low memory usage. They did not face this problem before upgrading to vSphere which has made them unhappy with the upgrade. Fortunately, I was aware with this problem & was able to apply the magical VMware patch that has restored the customer happiness & confidence in VMware. The require VMware ESX 4.0 Patch was ESX400-200909401-BG: updates vmx and vmkernel64.
Update: This post has been updated on Feb 23, 2011 as I have been kicked right and left by my colleagues at VMware, as this post used to be titled ”Running vCenter in a virtual machine within a distributed switch is not supported”, where its actually supported. Unfortunately, this info was communicated to me by VMware support when I was working at a partner before joining VMware but that was at the early dates when vDistributed Switch was first released. So here I am correcting my statement & mentioning its actually supported, but I still don’t recommend connecting your vCenter VM to the distributed switch it manage. The way I normally recommend doing things is actually to utilize a standard vSwitch for Management/VMkernel port groups where vCenter (running as a VM) connect to the Management port group. This configuration usually help avoid pitfalls. The below post has been updated accordingly.
RSS Feeds
