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Like most if us, I watched the VMware stock plummet over the past several weeks, and I am now relieved to see it recovering again. What inspired me to write this post was an article from TheStreet.com - VMware Shakes Off Worries - News & Analysis - Tech Stock Update - VMW - ORCL

“They say VMware, which has a commanding 90% share of the virtualization market, will maintain its edge for specialized software that allows servers to run multiple operating systems because its management software tools are superior to those of their competitors, including Microsoft.”

I’m not a trained financial analyst. I do not even actively trade stocks, but

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I run the free VMware Server on 32 bit Linux at home. I have it installed on PCLinuxOS 2007 - only because it was the distribution that I had loaded at the time. Before I installed VM Server I increased the server’s memory from 1 GB to 2 GB. Up until now I was only running a couple of VMs at a time and never really had any resource contention.

Just recently I decided to build some additional VMs, and to my surprise I noticed that the server was only showing 1 GB ram, and therefore VM Server only had 1 GB ram available for hosting guests. After some research I found the following article:

Linux.com :: Got more than a gig of RAM and 32-bit Linux? Heres how to use it

“Nowadays, many machines are running with 2-4 gigabytes of RAM, and their owners are discovering a problem: When they run 32-bit GNU/Linux distributions, their extra RAM is not being used. Fortunately, correcting the problem is only a matter of installing or building a kernel with a few specific parameters enabled or disabled.

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This post is more of an idea then a report. If you’ve experimented with a design similar to my thoughts below please post a comment and let me know!

Have you tried to configure VMs in a MS cluster across separate ESX hosts? How about clustering a physical server with a VM? VMware’s guide can be found here. Referencing this guide I am specifically talking about “Clustering Virtual Machines Across Physical Hosts (Cluster Across Boxes)” and “Clustering Physical Machines and Virtual Machines (Standby Host)”.

Read the guide and you’ll find there are several prerequisites and restrictions. The most important ones being:

• you must use RDMs in physical mode for shared storage
• dedicate at least 2 physical nics to the VMs
• you can not use multipathing software
• you must use the LSILogic virtual SCSI adapter in your VMs
• you can only use 32 bit VMs. You can not cluster with 64 bit VMs
• iSCSI disks are not supported. NAS disks are not supported.
• you can only use 2 node clustering
• the boot disks for the VMs must be on local storage
• clustered VMs can not participate in an ESX cluster and use VMotion, DRS and HA

So how do we design a clustered VM application that can fully leverage VMotion, DRS, and HA?

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These are my notes I used to prepare for a discussion with a client about implementing a secondary site for DR fail over. The client has already virtualized their production data center and is wanting to leverage VI for DR. The point of my discussion is that VI is too often viewed as a “silver bullet” for tough projects like back up and fail over. Yes, there are some specific areas that are easier to implement with VI, but careful consideration and planning must be executed if the overall DR plan is to be successful.

Goals and Objectives - the customer must make important decisions first !

· Recovery Time Objectives – acceptable time to start up systems and allow user access

requires server by server analysis

· Recovery Point Objectives – acceptable point in time recovery or start up at secondary site

requires application by application analysis

· Mission Critical Services

which applications & services must be available first.

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