YEAH!!!

Since a few days there is a new great book on the German market. VMware ESX 3.5: Automatisierung, Befehle, Scripting is a second burden of the a book which was a great blockbuster.

Dennis Zimmer, the author, gave me the possibility to write two chapters in this new book. VI Toolkit and RCLI derive from my ballpen.
I hope you buy the book and it helps you to work with the VI3. I think it is a great book for all people who work with VMware VI3.

You find the book here: Amazon

Have fun

Today, a new star in the Virtualization world leaves the stealth mode. The new compay icomasoft, founded from my good friend and VMware specialist Dennis Zimmer, released there website and first beta products.
This first product is called PowerScripter and a great solution for all admins who work with the VI Toolkit.
With the PowerScripter you are able to create a script on a easy way. A lot of options help you to optimize you scripts.

You can download the beta of the PowerScripter on www.icomasoft.com/downloads. The product page of the PowerScripter is accessible here: www.icomasoft.com/powerscripter

Check this programm and check the website from icomasoft. I think they will release more great products.

I got a newspaper in the airplane on friday called „Berliner Zeitung“. In  this newspaper was a litte article about the ISS (Internation Space Station). The headline was: „eMail Virus in ISS“.
One of the astronauts checked his eMails and opend a eMail with a virus which sends username and passwords to the writer of the virus. Geat news... Some hacker got the passwords for the iss? :) So much money for space shuttles, water-closets in weightlessness and rockets but not a good virus scanner.

Oh my God. I had today a call with my old principal from netIX. I talked with Herbert about a Oracle problem at a customer.
He asked me what´s going on and why I do no write more blog… I had a look to my blog and I saw that the last post is the 13th of may. Over 3 months ago. This is hard.

I am at the moment very busy. A lot of work at Sun, at the customer, at my german blog www.vamchine.de and at home.

I hope I can write in the feature again a few posts. The feedback I got while I wrote daily the blog was great so I hope I can do this again.

Now I must go to bed. Long and hard day but I will write tomorrow some news.

Thomas

Microsoft developer Guy Teverovsky developed a tool to configure the Windows Server 2008 Core version with a GUI.
Check it out.

In the last weeks I had a look on the new website of my cousin.  After a few clicks I saw something about cable virtualization. Cable virtualization? The first question went through my mind was what the hell is cable virtualization.

I called him and asked him some questions about it. He said there is a company which has a technology to virtualizes your cable in the data center. At http://www.xsigo.com I found some great information.

 

What this idea behind this?

The idea is pretty simple and cool. You have a box in the datacenter which is connected to your Fibre Channel SAN, gigabit network and you servers.

This box (they call it “Xsigo I/O Director“) connect to all application servers with a 10Gb/s interface. In the application server is only one network interface. A special 10Gb/s interface. Over this interface the server get virtualized other network interfaces and host bus adapters. They communicate over the 10Gb/s with the I/O Director. In the I/O Director they are physically connected to the SAN or LAN.

That helps you to reduce server cabeling and so on but the very cool thing comes now.

With this solution you can add new network interfaces or host bus adapter in 30 seconds to your application server. You are also able to move this HBA or NIC to a other server in your datacenter.

I think this is very cool.

With big partners like Microsoft and VMware there can be a big future for this product.

I hope I have the possibility to check this technology live in a datacenter or a testlab.

You find more information on this website. http://www.xsigo.com

 

Duncan found a nice new error message in VMware VI 3.5
So you notice in the console this two messages:

Node isolated from network. Either repair network or override agent startup using option –noiso

Node no longer isolated, will restart

Very cool! Thanks VMware,

Source 

In the new VI 3.5 you are able to add a plugin for VMware Converter in the Virtual Center.
Duncan had some problems to enable this plugin. He found two fixes to solve the problem.

First:

“ssleay32.dll” in the system32 directory is incompatible with the one VMware converter uses. Remove it, and everything will work like it should!

Second:

Go to the following registry key:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\VMware\VMware Infrastructure Client\Preferences\UI]
And set the following key to “Enabled”
“C:\\Program Files\\VMware\\Infrastructure\\Virtual Infrastructure Client\\Plugins\\Converter Enterprise\\plugin.dll”

Thanks Duncan!

Source 

Duncan write again aboaut a nice and helpfull tool for esx. With a script you can collect information about snapshots on you systems and send them to a e-mail address. Cool! Thanks Duncan

To the script and more information click here.

Microsoft finished Windows Server 2008! This is very cool! The new status of 2k8 is RTM which means that it is Releases to Manufacturing.
You can download the Server at the Technet and MSDN.

But... What is about Hyper-V? Hyper-V is included in the bits but its still a beta. So, be carefull in production environment.

The Release of Hyper-V is scheduled for the next 180 days...

I found a nice interview with Steve Wilson, Vice President of xVM at Sun.

Read the interview here. 

I found a cool manual to install the 3i on a usb flash drive.

source: http://communities.vmware.com/message/825686

Requirements:

• 1 GB USB flash drive
• WinImage
• IZArc

Of course you can use your favourite tools and larger USB flash drives, but 1 GB is enough space for the boot image.
Perform the following steps to create a bootable ESX Server 3i USB flash drive:

1. Download ESX Server 3i Installable ISO
2. Extract INSTALL.TGZ from the root directory of the ISO image using an IZArc
3. Extract /usr/lib/vmware/installer/VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0-67921.i386.dd.bz2 from INSTALL.TGZ using IZArc
4. Extract VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0-67921.i386.dd from VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0-67921.i386.dd.bz2 using IZArc
5. Attach the USB flash drive and make sure you no longer need the data on it
6. Use WinImage to transfer VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0-67921.i386.dd to the USB flash drive
7. Disk->Restore Virtual Hard Disk image on physical drive…
8. Select the USB flash drive (Warning: If you select the wrong disk you will lose data!)
9. Select the image file VMware-VMvisor-big-3.5.0-67921.i386.dd
10. Confirm the warning message
11. Wait for the transfer to complete
12. Unplug the USB flash drive (Warning: If you forget to unplug the flash drive from the PC you might lose the data on your hard drives the next time you boot!)
13. Attach the USB flash drive to the machine you want to boot (Warning: If ESX Server 3i recognizes local drives, you might lose the data on it, so make sure you don´t need it anymore or unplug all hard drives!)
14. Turn the machine on and make sure the USB flash drive is selected as boot device
15. Watch ESX Server 3i boot
16. Configure
17. Enjoy!

I cannot be held responsible for any damage or loss of data this procedure might cause.

I found a manual on this Blog how you can install e1000 NIC´s in the VM.

1. From the VM download and extract the Intel e1000 network driver for your Windows 32 Bit OS. Here
2. Shut down the VM
3. If you wan’t to be damm sure your VM doesn’t crash make a Snapshot
4. Connect to the host with ssh and edit the VM’s vmx file
5. Find the first entry that starts with ethernet0 and add the below line just before
ethernet0.virtualDev = “e1000″
6. Save and exit the vmx file
7. Power on the VM
8. When promted for the driver to the network card browse to the folder PRO1000 in the extracted folder.

VDI will be a big part of the virtualization. VMware released 4 PDF´s about VDI.

Using VMware VDI and vmSight for Stronger and Sustainable HIPAA and PCI Compliance
VMware VDM 2 Load Balancing Guide
Windows XP Deployment Guide
Using the Wyse V10L and S10 Thin Clients with VDM

Surfing the web I found a very cool Presentation about the ESX Storage Performance with good tips.

Download it here.