VM /ETC

Archive for April, 2009

VMware has published a vSphere Pre-requisites Checklist PDF that will be very handy document to have when planning for the upgrade of a current VMware Infrastructure. The following is part of the document’s introduction and explains it’s purpose:

“This Pre-requisites Checklist is intended for those involved in planning, designing, and upgrading an existing VMware Infrastructure to VMware vSphere. The intended audience includes the roles listed below:

• Solution Architects responsible for driving architecture-level decisions
• Consultants, Partners, and IT personnel, who require knowledge for deploying and upgrading the vSphere infrastructure

it is assumed that they have knowledge and familiarity with VMware Infrastructure and have access to the VMware Infrastructure and VMware vSphere product documentation for reference.”

The document is considered a draft version, and will be updated when vSphere is generally available (GA) later this Quarter (Late May?). Even in it’s current state, the PDF walks administrators and architects through all possible planning and upgrade scenarios of both vCenter and ESX  hosts and points out a lot of the potential gotchas of a vSphere 4 migration.

I’m sure I will use this document regularly over then next 12 months. I might as well have it laminated once it’s finalized after GA!

Now that the Launch is over and VMware has announced vSphere, virtualization administrators and IT management have some decisions to make. Personally, I’ve heard many different reactions to VMware’s new product, and they have  ranged from being awestruck about the new features to being concerned about the impact of new licensing. So, I’ll ask the VM /ETC readers in this informal poll and with comments on this post to sound off about how you feel about vSphere and what you and your company are planning to do – either with your current virtual infrastructure or in a future implementation.

[poll id="5"]

Like the VM /ETC polls before I plan to let this one run for a couple weeks. It will close on May 15. Thanks in advance for taking the time to respond!

David Marshall has written a post on his Virtualization Report Blog on Infoworld.com titled 10 free tools to help with your virtualization environment. While writing this post David asked me for my input on what free tools I use on a regular basis. You may be thinking “great, just another blog post about the same free virtualization ecosystem tools”, but I commend David for sticking with a slightly different approach to this topic.

When I responded I applied the idea of “what free tools I actually use the most on a day to day basis.” Sure, there are a lot of “the same virtualization ecosystem tools” I mentioned earlier in my list, but in reality what I depend on the most and show my clients are utilities designed for physical server environments too. For example, burning ISO files, remote desktop connections, remote access and file transfer, and server operating system status information tools get used just as much as the specific tools developed to administer the virtualization hosts.

David also polled fellow vExperts Stephen Beaver and Jason McCarty as well, so check out the post in full for a great list of tools and links to download them. Marshall is a vExpert himself by the way, and his VMblog.com (one of many he writes for) is an awesome source of virtualization news, press releases, and opinion.

Vizioncore, makers of virtualization products such as vRanger, vReplicator, vConverter, vOptimizer, and vCharter Pro, has made available free online training materials for all of it’s products. Via the vZone page on the Vizioncore website, any one has access to professional training course notes, lab excercises, and multimedia presentation recordings.

The Vizioncore vZone training content I have seen so far is on par with any multi day course I have taken in the past (for any company’s product training), and the lab manuals have been extremely valuable as a walk through set up and configuration guide. The content can even serve as a means of evaluating Vizioncore’s excellent offerings (updated 04.24.07 most products have a free trial)  to compliment and enhance you virtual infrastructure administration.

Take advantage of these free training resources at Vizioncore vZone – Training.

VMware’s simulcast event was about a revolutionary Cloud OS and how Vsphere is a visionary, data center changing software release. Now that it has been officially announced, there are posts everywhere about the features and functionalities of VMware vSphere 4. Those discussions are exciting and true, but I feel the fact that vSphere is simply the latest release of ESX and VMware Virtual Infrastructure (VI) gets lost in the fanfare. I tend to think at the upgrade and implementation level, so this post quickly focuses on how current customers will get their new licenses along with a few changes to consider before upgrading. The Cloud will happen, and there is no doubt that VMware vSphere will be instrumental in that, but for now, VMware customers need to understand what is involved in transitioning existing virtual infrastructure to vSphere 4.

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This post is my proposal for the need to use a common Twitter hash tag that can be used both now and in the future by the virtualization community. My proposal is to adopt #v12n as our tag.  Let’s use it for events, news, or even when something interesting enough to to discuss as a huge group happens. If you did not know, v12n is sort of an acronym for virtualization: there are 12 letters between the “v” and the “n”. If we all start using this tag as a common denominator when appropriate we can track full conversations more easily (in Tweetdeck, Tweetgrid, or Search.twitter.com for example) and group broader amounts of information and reactions when searching.  Our tweets can also be trended and ranked on sites like hashtags.org.

The following comment on my Ideas For Keeping Up With The VMware Launch Event On April 21 post earlier today explains my main argument for this need. The conversation was about using “vSphere” as a tag. Check it out and let me know what you think.

“… here is my thoughts on search and hash tags. Read the rest of this entry »

Just like with VMworld Europe 2009, I am again having to try to figure out the best ways to keep up with a virtualization event I can not attend in person.  Even though the simulcast will be live the chances of me getting to sit and watch it look slim. So, here are my ideas on how I plan to to follow the April 21 VMware Launch Event from afar while I work my way through the day.

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