Things that make you go hmmmm - May 16, 2008
I’ve listed 3 quick links that made me grin this week. Hopefully they will do the same for you!
San Diego Media Blog
I wanted to share some of my photos from my week in San Diego at VMware Partner Exchange 2008. I have some panoramic shots of San Diego by night and day, a shot from the bay of the Sheraton Hotel and Marina, as well as photos from the party at the Wavehouse. I took some time after the conference ended Thursday afternoon to take a harbor cruise. The San Diego Harbor Excursion offers 1 hour tours of both the North and South Bay, and luckily I had time to take the full tour.
I used Google’s Picasa to create a quick collage of some of my favorite shots of the week.
This post also has a short video of the surfers performing for us in the Bruticus Maximus wave machine at the event party. Enjoy!
Microsoft Offline Virtual Machine Servicing Tool
The Offline Virtual Machine Serving Tool appears to be Microsoft’s equivalent to VMware’s Update Manger for ESX - in some capacity. The Solution Accelerator tool schedules and automates updates of virtual machines that are not normally powered on in your virtual infrastructure. The tool powers up the VMs allowing them to receive updates such as antivirus definitions, security updates and patches. Unlike ESX 3.5’s Update Manager, the tool only manages the offline VM updates. Server 2008, Hyper-V, and running VM updates will be handled via WSUS and normal Windows Update processes.
The Executive Overview page provides some more information:
Staying ahead of the hypervisor competition
I am proud to announce that SearchVMware.com has invited me to become a contributer to the Virtualization Pro Blog. My first post was published earlier today.
“Maybe it’s because I just spent a week at the VMware Partner Exchange in San Diego and I am full of the VMware “Kool Aid”, but it appears to me that VMware has a pretty good strategy, focus and direction for staying ahead of the competition. While other vendors are still perfecting and marketing their hypervisor, VMware is talking about automation and management of the virtual data center with products like Site Recovery Manager, Lab Manager, Stage Manager, and Lifecycle Manager.”
Please check out the rest of Is hypervisor competition really just about the hypervisor?
Be sure to add this great virtualization site to your bookmarks and feed readers and look for future posts from me there!
VM /ETC IE font and pics problem fixed .. I think
I finally got to the bottom of the weird, bold, font problem and the missing pictures on the home page of my site when using Internet Explorer. Turns out that a plug in, In Series, was part of the issue. I removed the plug in and the home page looks normal again in IE6. I tested IE7 too, and the fonts are fixed but the “Latest” post now seems to be disappearing. Scrolling down the page and then back up again will occasionally make the first post appear again. The missing pics were fixed by an upgrade to my theme.
All flavors of Firefox have always worked perfectly. So, I guess you could say my site is optimized for Firefox!
Let me know if you see any other issues with other browsers too.
Thanks for putting up with the IE problems, and thanks for reading VM /ETC.
Troubleshooting ESX logs
Another session I attended at VMware’s Partner Exchange last week was titled ESX Log Analysis - Tech 207. I did not realize it when I signed up, but this was essentially the same session that I previously attended at VMWorld 2007 last September. I did a quick Google search on this topic to find the VMWorld slides and noticed that Scott Lowe live blogged from San Francisco while attending this very session. Then Searching on the VMWorld.com site I found that this was also a session at VMWorld Europe 2008 titled VI3 Advanced Log Analysis. You can get a copy of the .ppt used at the VMWorld Europe 2008 session on my Files Page.
There is nothing really too new about t-shooting ESX logs here, but the following are my notes from last week. On the other hand, there are some general notes directly related to ESXi logs and using Update Manager included.
I cleaned up my notes a little, but the following is still a raw outline. use These notes and the .ppt mentioned above to hopefully help educate yourself on this topic.
Citrix XenServer Versions
Last week’s post about Dell’s embedded hypervisor options and the Help Me Choose: Hypervisor page sparked some reader discussion about whether XenServer can be used with shared storage. The answer to that question is that it depends on which version of XenServer you order. Dell is offering either XenServer Express or XenServer Enterprise versions as embedded options. Express is a limited version and can not use shared storage while Enterprise is fully featured and capable of using a SAN.
Citrix also offers a XenServer Standard edition, but apparently that version is not an option as an embedded hypervisor when ordering Dell hardware.
The image in this post and the following table were copied from the Citrix XenServer v4 web page. They offer a quick overview of the differences between the 3 versions.
VMware Site Recovery Manager available to order next week
VMware announced officially today that Site Recovery Manager will be available for order next week and then generally available within 30 days. As I mentioned in my Site Recovery Manager Overview post last week, a requirement to using SRM will be a Site Recovery Agent (SRA) from the various storage vendors. VMware’s announcement reveals what vendors will provide SRAs initially:
“VMware Site Recovery Manager leverages customers’ investment in storage replication software from VMware’s leading storage partners including 3PAR, Dell, EMC, FalconStor, Hitachi Data Systems, HP, IBM, LeftHand Networks and NetApp. VMware is working with partners across its storage partner ecosystem to ensure that customers can use Site Recovery Manager with their storage system and software platform of choice.”
As expected, several reports surfaced on the Internet today
Help Me Choose a Hypervisor
I was researching Dell’s latest announcement, Dell Unveils Virtualization Blockbuster – From Servers and Storage to Software and Services and trying to find definitive proof of the $99 price for embedded ESXi or the $299 price for embedded Citrix XenServer Express as reported by virtualization.info. Although I did not find the pricing in the announcement, I was able to find it by going through the process of using the Dell Online Store to build a R805 server. By clicking the green “customize it” button I was eventually able to see the Optional Virtualization Offerings section with the pricing for the embedded hypervisors. See the screenshot to the right. (click for larger view)What surprised me during this process was the “Help me Choose” link in this section. Clicking that link took me to a Help Me Choose: Hypervisor page from Dell that is basically accurate and helpful for comparing high level features of ESX 3.5, ESXi, Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V.
Here is a screenshot of the comparison table from Dell’s page.
VMware Site Recovery Manager Overview
One of the hands on labs I attended at VMware Partner Exchange was the Site Recovery Manager (SRM) lab. In the lab I was able to get a good understanding of the technical details of how the yet to be released product is configured. The lab then walked us through the fail over process and workflow. This post is a high level summary of what I learned. This post is not intended to be a detailed how to, but instead just a logical overview about what it will take to set up SRM.
VCDX announced - Advanced Certification for VMware Infrastructure Design
In the May 2008 edition of the VMware Partners email newsletter I received this week there is news of the official availability of the VMware Certified Design Expert certification or VCDX. From the email:
Advanced Certification for VMware Infrastructure Design
The VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) is an advanced certification developed for design architects of VMware enterprise deployments. There are four core validation components for achieving this certification.
- Must be certified as a VMware Certified Professional (VCP) on VMware Infrastructure 3
- Pass the VMware Enterprise Exam. This exam includes live lab items and will test a higher level of skill set than the VCP exam. Check out the blueprint for this exam.
- Pass the VMware Design Exam. This exam focuses on actual design and contains and situational questions
- Submit, present and defend a successful VMware Infrastructure design plan
The first exam required will be available
DRS and Power Management under the hood of my Prius
I ended up with a Toyota Prius as my rental car for the week in San Diego. I’ve never driven a Prius before, and honestly, I’ve never really had an interest in the car until now. Like most, I knew that the Prius uses a Hybrid Synergy Drive (HSD) engine, but I had no idea about all the cool technology built into making the car so efficient. As a matter of fact, the Prius engine technology is in some ways similar to the Distributed Resource Scheduling and Power Management features of VI3 Enterprise.
According to wikipedia’s page about the HSD: