VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘ibm’

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 Read the rest of this entry »

VMware VirtualCenter comes with built in alerting and a handful of alerts preconfigured. Unfortunately, alerting for disk space usage of either the ESX hosts or the virtual machines is not included. Administrators continue to use common physical infrastructure monitoring and reporting applications such as NetIQ and MOM for VMs, or SNMP capable programs like HP Openview or IBM Director for ESX host monitoring. A less complex and less expensive ( cost of installing and configuring agents on each VM OS ) alternative would be to tap into VirtualCenter’s central management ability to monitor, alert, and report on disk space. This post lists a few free solutions that can already use VC2.x or quickly be configured for ESX hosts and therefore save administrators time and money. Hopefully, a future feature of VC2.x will include vital disk space metrics and alerting.

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updated 03.13.08 – Unfortunately I declared victory too soon on this issue. I got a status update this week and the customer can deploy from template in some scenarios but is still getting the same error at times. The HP SIM agents are still turned off and have not been ruled out as part of the problem, but IBM has provided a recommended design and they have made the changes.

As Brian points out in his comment the customer has a multiple IBM SVC design in front of multiple storage devices.

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Last week I helped a customer resolve an issue where whenever they deployed a new VM from a template the job would fail with the error “Failed to deploy template: The virtual disk is either corrupted or not a supported format” We were troubleshooting numerous ESX servers and the problem was the same on all the hosts. The template was fine. We changed it back to a VM and turned it on without issue. The vmtools and virtual hardware were up to date.

Surprisingly the Virtual Center error message was not well indexed on Google. I was scratching my head until I stumbled across the VMware Communities thread Read the rest of this entry »

When I hear “we only have 6 servers so our migration to VI should be quick and easy, right?” I hesitate. Not because it can’t be done, but because of how it should be done and the probable challenges. The expectation is usually that the physical servers should be virtualized as is. The reality is often that in order to achieve the best VI design the customer needs to separate applications and services.

A typical small office server infrastructure is usually similar to the following:

The exact placement of the different applications and services varies, but the result is the same. A small company P2V project really should be an infrastructure redesign project so that the features and benefits of VI can be fully leveraged. The following are my recommendations for the VI design of a small company like the example. Read the rest of this entry »

Aaron Delp’s BladeVault.info site reports about calculators from HP and IBM that can help you plan for power when considering physical server consolidation by implementing blades. IBM’s calculator is a downloadable .msi while HP’s is an online calculator. HP also offers a downloadable offline version which has limited functionality compared to the online tool. IBM’s calculator is not just limited to blades as it computes power figures for all x series servers.

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I just got back from vacation and wanted to see what has been happening in Cannes at VMWorld Europe. I drove the family to Orlando, FL and “did the Disney thing” for 4 days so I was out of touch. Thanks to blogs like VMTN, NITRO.NL, and virtualization.info I was able to get relatively caught up in a single afternoon.

The first, and most logical place, to start was John Troyer’s VMTN blog. As always, John has done a great job rounding up opinion, news, reactions, and even multimedia covering the event. Scrolling almost to the bottom of the VMTN front page and working my way up walked me through Partner Day on Monday to Day 2 of the Conference on Wednesday.

And we’re off … VMWorld Europe 2008 gave me the link to the recorded keynote webcasts which I listened to in the background while I

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One of the announcements this week from VMworld Europe was that ESX 3i will begin shipping integrated in Dell, Fujitsu Siemens, HP, and IBM industry standard servers in the next 60 days. The following is a VMware VIP Partner Bulletin email I received. Check out the links to the hardware manufacturer’s individual announcements in the body of this email.

Dear Richard,

Today, February 26, 2008 at VMworld Europe, VMware announced agreements with the world’s largest systems providers—Dell, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, HP and IBM—to embed VMware ESX Server 3i across broad lines of servers to accelerate the proliferation of virtualization across companies ranging from small business to large enterprises. These partners are expected to commence shipping their respective industry-standard servers integrated with VMware ESX Server 3i within the next 60 days.

Last year we previewed this strategy with you when we announced the latest release of VMware Infrastructure 3 and ESX 3i. Combined, Dell, Fujitsu Siemens Computers, HP and IBM accounted for Read the rest of this entry »