VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘blog.scottlowe.org’

[updated 06.29.09] – The owner of the site has professionally responded in the commnents following this post. I appreciate the reply and this exercise has made me to decide to investigate providing multiple RSS feeds for VM /ETC.

To the owner(s) of networkvirtualization.com:

Change the current method of publishing protected vmetc.com content to a more acceptable style of blog aggregation, contact me to arrange a syndication agreement, or take down any and all of my content from your site.

Based on Scott Lowe’s post I Love Having My Content Stolen and the consistent reaction in both Scott’s post comments and on Twitter, I assume it’s in your best interest to do the same for all the other bloggers whose content you have used.

What is acceptable? Here are some examples.

Blog Aggregation

Take a look at Planet v12n or VirtualizationFeed.com. In summary, publish only a preview of the post, provide the proper attribution to the creator, and make sure the link is obvious and goes back to the original site and not the RSS feed. Both also maintain a blog roll of the aggregated sites.

Blog Syndication

Use Gestaltit.com for an example. As a syndicated author, I allow specific posts to be republished there via an arranged agreement. Each author’s personal blog is linked and each has their own individual Gestaltit.com RSS feed as well.

Quotes and References

Feel free quote or reference published content to make your own point. Be sure to make the quote/reference identifiable and give proper credit to the originator.

Let me clarify

I am flattered that you enjoy my content and I welcome the additional exposure. I get a great sense of satisfaction from the public use of vmetc.com. I’m not saying, nor does my Creative Commons license state, the vmetc.com RSS feed cannot be used. It is simply a matter of proper format and due recognition.

Even though my posts are available in full in my RSS feed, I suggest using a news reader such as Google Reader or social media such as Facebook and Friendfeed to access my content, as well as aggregating any other blogs, from the convenience of a web browser on any computer.

Scott Lowe is live blogging from TechED 2008 in Orlando, FL this week, and his Tech-Ed 2008 Keynote Liveblog post from this morning’s opening Keynote reports on some interesting cross virtualization vendor management capability of Microsoft System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM). I’ve blogged previously about how I believe the future virtual data center will a combination of ESX, XenServer, and Hyper-V hosts, so the idea of a single managment server for all platforms is very exciting.

Read all of Scott’s post at the link above, but here’s a few quotes that give a good overview of how the demo worked:

“At this point, Rakesh Malhotra comes on the screen to show off using System Center Virtual Machine Manager (SCVMM) to manage Hyper-V, Virtual Server, and VMware ESX. Rakesh launches the VI Client to show that there is a three-node ESX cluster. Flipping over to SCVMM, Rakesh showed that the same ESX cluster shows up side-by-side with a Hyper-V cluster.”

“In the next part of the demo, Rakesh uses SCVMM to perform a VMotion operation on the ESX cluster. Here, at least, Rakesh alludes to the fact that VMotion provides no downtime to the user, whereas Quick Migration does not. Bob chimes in to remind users that live migration will be added to a future version of Hyper-V.”

Avoiding storage array snapshot pitfalls in a VMware environment is an article and tip published by Scott Lowe for Searchvmware.com. Scott discusses the design challenges and implications of combining the snapshot abilities of VMware ESX with the SAN based snapshot features of storage devices. The tip points out that incorrect configuration of VMware ESX with the storage device could lead to inconsistent and unusable images when trying to recover VMs.

“Because these snapshots are not, by default, integrated in any way with VMware ESX Server, we have to perform a few extra steps to ensure consistently reliable and usable storage array snapshots.”

Read all of Scott’s tip at the link to the article above.

My “2 cents” on this is that trying to configure the combination of the two snapshots manually might not Read the rest of this entry »

A Few Thoughts on Xen posted on blog.scottlowe.org got me thinking about the pricing differences between Citrix XenServer and VMware ESX Server. It is a general assumption that Xen Server is more affordable than ESX. I decided to figure out exactly what the products cost and how they compare to each other. I am not factoring in the cost of Sales and Support in this post because I would want that regardless of which vendor I choose.

I found Citrix XenServer list pricing from a Citrix presentation slide deck that was presented to me via a webinar several weeks ago. Click on the image to see a larger version. Read the rest of this entry »

Another improvement alternative to the cumbersome storage vmotion feature has been made by the user community. I am assuming (and hoping) that one day soon we will all be announcing (and celebrating) the patch that includes the native VC 2.5 ability to call and configure storage vmotion from the VI Client, but until VMware does that the user community can be counted on to continue to make the process easier.

Graphical Front-End for Storage VMotion – blog.scottlowe.org is where I found out about Alexander Gaiswinkler’s post in the VMware Communities announcing his GUI for SVMotion. Installation instructions from Alexander’s post: Read the rest of this entry »

Last week I was helping a client upgrade to VI 3.5 and experienced some unexpected VM reboots. Unfortunately I did not discover the reason it happened until after the upgrade. I was reading blog.scottlowe.com when I found the post ESX Server 3.0.1 Patch Needed for VC 2.5. From the post:

According to this VMware KB document, any ESX Server running version 3.0.1 should have patch ESX-7557441 installed before VirtualCenter is upgraded to version 2.5. If this patch is not installed, Read the rest of this entry »

Every time I have to work with a customer’s networking engineers, or even my own Cisco consultants, I get funny looks when I have to tell them that there is not much to the nic teaming configuration on an ESX server.

Once a vSwitch is created it’s just a matter of assigning multiple physical NICs, creating port groups with the assigned VLANs, and setting the right policy. To the disbelief of the network guys, that can be done without adding any driver utilities or third party management software. After that ESX will load balance traffic headed out of the ESX host to the physical switch and provide redundancy for NIC fail over. Up to this point no changes to the switch are even needed.

On the physical switch side it does require more involved set up to provide inbound load balancing and setting up an ether channel. There are many guides already available on how to do this. Here are a few for reference:

ESX Server, NIC Teaming, and VLAN Trunking – blog.scottlowe.org

VMware ESX Server 3 802.1Q VLAN Solutions