At the blog of Edwin Friesen is a „nice to have“ for the VMware VI Client. A manual to „Thinstall the VMware Client“

Read the hole artice with a good manual here

Thomas 

I read often questions in forums about the Ms SQL Database Server and the VI3. A time apart from that MySQL is the best database server (now!) *g*, you can use the SQL Server in a lot of versions.

At this pdf you find the information about MS SQL and Oracle on site 4.

A lot of people don´t know that with the new Version 2.5 of the Virtual Center you can use the free version of MS SQL 2005 in production environments. There is only a limitation of maximum 5 ESX Hosts and 50 virtual machines. For Companies which start with virtualization or don´t have a big environment it´s perfect.

If you use more or a other version of the SQL Server you need only one client access license. The only machine which communicates with the SQL Server is the Virtual Center. That´s important to know!

Hope some pepole read this... *G*

Thomas
 

There is a new, nice book from Microsoft in the Internet! Nice! *G*

Read it here.

 

Hey guys,

the HowTo from Duncan about the E-Mails which send you information about the VMFS Volumes had a big feedback. Duncan write now a short HowTo about the mailing from the SC.
Read it here.

Thomas

A teaser trailer for the new Star Trek film has finally found its way onto the web. Star Trek XI will detail the early days of James T Kirk and his crew and will chronologically sit after the TV series Enterprise.
Due for release in December of this year, the cast includes Winona Ryder as a young Spock's mum - remember she was human - the little-known Chris Pine as James T Kirk and Simon Pegg to play the young Engineer Montgomery Scott.

Watch the Trailer.

At the website of the VMworld Europe is a first list with Sessions available. There are some very interesting Sessions which are duty for me. NFS & iSCSI: Performance Characterization and Best Practices in ESX 3.5, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure - Considerations and Best Practices,Introduction to Storage VMotion, The Open Virtual Machine Format! See you in Cannes!

Microsoft announces that Citrix platforms, XenServer, VMware platforms and Presentation server, will be managed by System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM).
At the same time Citrix announces that its new connection broker, XenDesktop, will support upcoming Hyper-V as virtualization host. Additionally Citrix announces that it's working on a V2V migration tool able to seamless move virtual machines between Hyper-V and XenServer.

One of the last big companys who announce support for VMware environments is SAP! Michael Hesse, responsible for the technical side of the SAP Alliance, publishes a useful guideline to install SAP inside ESX Server VMs:

• Use the latest processor generations due to their enhanced support for virtualization.
• For optimal results use virtual machines with one or two virtual CPUs. It is possible to use four virtual CPUs if your workload requires more processing power, but performance-wise two virtual machines allocated two vCPUs each will give better throughput.
• Follow the SAP rules for setting up file systems for your database installation.
• Don't over-commit memory! With VMware it is possible to assign more virtual memory to the virtual machines than there is physical memory available in the host. This practice is not recommended at all with SAP solutions. SAP allocates memory permanently and does not release it again. To enforce this policy, we recommend setting the "Memory Reservation" to the amount of memory configured for the virtual machine. This will ensure that the virtual machine with the SAP instance will always have the full amount of memory available. The same can be done for the "CPU Reservation," but we recommend enabling this only in case of performance problems, since the reserved resources are not available to other virtual machines any more.
• Install VMware Tools to avoid time conflicts.
• If you are using SQL Server as the database, use "fixed memory allocation" to avoid the allocation overhead of "dynamic" memory allocation.
• For CPU-bound systems with sufficient memory resources, use the SAP flat memory model with memory protection (mprotect) switched off.
• For memory bound systems, use the classical SAP view memory model.

Duncan Epping release a nice script which check you free space of the VMFS Volumes and send it via E-Mail to you. NICE!

Here you can see the article with the script.

VMware released today 9 patches for ESX 3.5 and 1 patch for ESX 3i. You can download the Patches here: 3.5 and 3i

The patch for ESX 3i fixes the following:

• ESX Server 3i hosts using more than two processor sockets cannot be licensed when using host-based licensing.
• VMware Virtual Center does not properly record the number of processors on Dual-Core Intel Xeon processor 7200 series based hosts.
• An issue with the BCM5709 firmware where ping requests sometimes fail after loading and unloading the bnx2 driver.
• An issue with the bnx2 driver where a device using the bnx2 driver fails to connect to the a 100 Mbps network during the network autonegotiation period after system boot.

The patches for ESX 3.5 contain the following:

• Update to the bnx2 Driver
• Security Update to the Samba Package
• Security Update to the util-linux Package
• Security Update to the Perl Package
• Security Update to the openssl Package
• Daylight Saving Time Update
• vmkernel-vmnix Update for the bnx2 Driver
• Intel Xeon Processor 7200 Series Based Servers Licensing Issues
• Multi-processor Licensing Issues, VMotion Assert Failure

Duncan Epping released a intressting blog entry about „Service Console redundancy“. He describe three workarounds for this problem.

Read it here.

There is a new version of the ESX 3i available. The new build number 70348 is just a minor update.

• EULA Update—The reissued version of ESX Server 3i Installable incorporates an updated, corrected version of the EULA.
• Licensing Fix—The reissued version of ESX Server 3i Installable lets you apply appropriate host-based licenses to servers that have more than two CPUs.

The market around the virtualization of the Mac OS X will be hard-fought. After Parallels which will support Leopard in the upcoming release VMware post today a VMTN Blog entry with new information.
Is a Fusion server coming?

Today, we are pleased to say that VMware is able to virtualize Mac OS X Leopard Server on Apple hardware using VMware?s proven Mac virtualization engine. We will be demonstrating this achievement with our ?Mac OS X Server in a Virtual Machine? Technology Preview...
And since Mac OS X Leopard has moved to 64-bit, we are able to leverage VMware's proven 64-bit support to run Mac OS X Server at it's full potential, a feature that has been a VMware exclusive for more than three years.
...
The one question we know we will get asked is will VMware support Mac OS X Server on non-Apple hardware. While this is only a technology preview today, VMware works closely with Apple and respects their licensing policies and as such Mac OS X Server in a virtual machine will only be supported on Apple hardware per Apple?s license agreement...

You can read a very interessting news on a personal blog. A new VMware certification for design architects will be released.

A new advanced certification for design architects of enterprise deployments, VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDE), will be in beta toward the end of November. The VCDE measures the consultants ability to design, implement, document and test a VMware Infrastructure data center for the enterprise. Requirements for the VMware Certified Design Expert include:

• VMware Certified Professional (VCP) on VMware Infrastructure 3
• Pass a VMware Infrastructure 3 Enterprise level exam and a VMware Infrastructure 3 design exam
• Submit, present and defend a successful virtual infrastructure design plan

VMware did it again! VMware acquires Thinstall

VMware, Inc. , the virtualization software leader, today announced it has entered into a definitive agreement to acquire Thinstall, a privately-held application virtualization software company headquartered in San Francisco. VMware is acquiring Thinstall to expand its desktop virtualization capabilities which help customers better provision, deploy and update desktop environments. The terms of the acquisition, which is expected to be completed in the current fiscal quarter, subject to customary closing conditions, were not disclosed...

There is the official announcement.Click!