VM /ETC

Posts Tagged ‘vmware’

The week of June 7 through June 11 is going to be five fun days for me spread across two events in the South East US. If any VM /ETC readers or VIRTUMANIA listeners will be attending either Microsoft TechEd 2010 or the Charlotte VMUG’s annual Carolina VMware Users Summit 2010 please stop by the Veeam booth and say "Hi".

Here’s a quick summary of what I’ll be doing at each event.

Managing VMware At TechEd?

No we are not advocating the first square off between VMware and Microsoft of the conference season. On the contrary, The Veeam nworks Management Pack helps those who use Systems Center Operations Manager (SCOM) better monitor, manage, and report on their VMware Infrastructure. We actually help VMware admins and Microsoft Operations teams get along!

I’ll be in the booth with @vmdoug, @dsiles, and others from @veeam. If you’ll be in New Orleans Monday June 7 through Weds June 9 so please stop by.

Charlotte VMUG Summit vExpert Panel

On Thursday that week I’ll be jetting back to Charlotte,NC for the VMUG Summit on Friday June 11. As a Gold Sponsor Veeam will obviously have a table / booth in the vendor area in which I’ll be working, but we will also be presenting in our own 1:30 pm “Image-Level Backups You Can Count On” session.

The high light for the VMUG Summit will definitely be the vExpert Panel at 2:30 pm. We are still ironing out the exact topics to cover, but the panel will feature Scott Lowe, Chad Sakac, Vaughn Stewart, Mike Laverick, and possibly others in a open discussion on virtualization and storage. I’m honored to be invited as a moderator for this discussion, and it’s sure to be an informative and entertaining session.

Register for the Carolina VMUG Summit here.

Here are links to other posts from the panel members on the Charlotte VMUG Summit

• Carolina VMware Users Summit 2010 (scottlowe.org)
• Charlotte VMUG – will be a doozy… (virtualgeek)
• Charlotte VMUG Annual Conference – a mini VMworld? (virtualstorageguy)

I’m definitely looking forward to seeing everyone in New Orleans and Charlotte in a few weeks!

If you are exploring the latest beta version of VMware Workstation or Player you are not getting access to the full performance of the application due to debug mode being enabled by default. Sure I want to help in the development process, but there are times I just want to experience the bliss of reveling in the latest application improvements at top performance. For these times, this post documents a couple of ways others have successfully turned off debug mode for VMware Workstation on Windows and on suggests how to do the same on Linux. This post also points out that disabling debug mode in the free VMware Player is not an option.

Although I’ve received a similar notice when running beta VMware Workstation on my systems, I most recently have been exploring the Player 3.1 Beta. The following screen shot shows the debug mode pop up notification whenever a VM is powered on.

Disable Debug Mode In VMware Workstation on Windows

Here’s one of the latest VMware Communities threads explaining how to do it: Turn off Beta Debug mode. As described in the forum thread, the answer to disabling debug mode could be this simple:

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With the recent news that VMware will be phasing out VMware Consolidated Backup and make the vStorage API for Data Recovery (VADR) the business continuity and full virtual machine backup enabler of the future, I want to better understand where VMware Data Recovery (vDR) fits in a virtual infrastructure today. This post outlines my notes as I explored both features and limitations of vDR in order to help explain how, where and when the product can be leveraged.

vSphere Editions needed for vDR

A great place to start is by understanding what licensed versions of vSphere 4 vDR can be used with. Using VMware’s vSphere edition comparison table you can clearly see that vDR is only available for use with the Essentials Plus, Advanced, Enterprise, and Enterprise Plus versions.

Although vDR is available in the Enterprise and Enterprise Plus editions, the limitations described in the next section present some design challenges for deploying vDR in larger environments.

Disclaimer: I am a systems engineer for Veeam Software.

Special Considerations For Using vDR

The following list of vDR limitations was taken from the VMware Data Recovery 1.1 Administration Guide:

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VMware announced this week that nominations for 2010 vExpert are being accepted until April 30, 2010. Be sure to vote for your favorite “bloggers, book authors, VMUG leaders, event organizers, speakers, tool builders, forum leaders, and others who share their virtualization expertise” by filling out the official application found at the new vExpert 2010 Landing site.

For those who do not know, the vExpert Award was introduced by VMware in 2009. Best described as an award similar to Microsoft’s MVP, I was lucky enough to be named one of the 300 vExperts awarded last year. Check out my acceptance speech post from last February. All joking aside, the award distinguishes those “who have significantly contributed to the community of VMware users over the past year.”

The application process is not a contest or an election campaign, so if you have a candidate that may not be as well known in the vEcosphere already but has significantly contributed to the VMware and virtualization community be sure to fill out an application for him/her. All it takes is one application to recognize someone for their efforts in 2009!

A recent announcement from Likewise Software hints that future versions of VMware vSphere may make it easier for companies to manage ESX hosts using Active Directory (AD) credentials. vCenter, which runs on a Windows Server operating system, is commonly added to an AD domain already, but special configurations are necessary to authenticate ESX host access with domain credentials today. Here’s a clip from the announcement:

“The integration will enable VMware vSphere users to manage privileged user access with Microsoft Active Directory, providing large enterprises with a scalable means to improve authentication and access control in virtualized environments to help meet IT security audit requirements. Likewise is a member of the VMware Technology Alliance Partner (TAP) program.”

I recently ran across this announcement via virtualization.info’s article VMware to embed Likewise authentication in next vSphere, but originally read about it in the vreference.com post ESX 4.1 to include likewise AD authentication?

Likewise Open is an “open source application that joins Linux, Unix, and Mac machines to Microsoft Active Directory and securely authenticates users with their domain credentials.” The Open edition is free to download and use. Likewise also offers

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Almost as if to segue from my recent Virtumania Podcast episode about type 2 hypervisors, VMware has announced the release of the public betas for the latest versions of their popular Workstation and Player desktop products. Touting several new features and performance improvements, VMware Workstation 7.1 and Player 3.1 betas can now be downloaded from their VMware Beta Community pages.

I am downloading my copy as I write this post, but several new features have caught my attention.

• Open GL 2.1 support for Windows 7 and Vista guests
• Improved graphics support enabling high resolution videos in VMs
• Autologin for Windows Guests
• Inclusion of the OVF 1.0 command line tool to convert VMs to .OVF files for exporting to other hypervisors
• 8 way vCPU support in VMs
• up to 2TB virtual disks
• Direct Launch – drag icon to host desktop and seamlessly start an application inside a VM – even after closing VMware Workstation or Player.
• Support for Fedora 12 as a guest OS
• VMware Ace upgraded to version 3.7

Also, I can’t help but notice Known Issues from the Release Notes such as the following:

“Display

• Exiting FIFA 08 game on Windows 7 guests and hosts with Aero enabled, might cause the desktop wallpaper to turn black.
• There are known issues with the ATI Linux driver 10.2. VMware recommends that you use ATI Linux driver 9.11 for the best 3D user experience.”

Looks like I’ve got some new testing to do! (and maybe a new 3D games video to make!)

Copying more information from the Release Notes:

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The vSphere Enterprise Plus vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS) has been heralded as, and I might add lives up to it’s reputation of, an administrator’s time saver and single point of virtual networking configuration and visibility across many ESX/ESXi 4 hosts. However, the vDS presents some administrative challenges unique from the traditional vNetwork Standard Switch (vSS) that admins are used to. Specifically, since the vCenter 4 Server actually maintains the vDS configuration, some extra design thinking needs to be built into a vSphere 4 environment where a vDS will be used. If vCenter 4 Server itself will be a virtual machine in the environment with a vDS, the design gets even more involved.

There are a few possible problems to consider. In this post I’ll first cover (with the help of a several others) general VM and vCenter vDS networking issues, but along the way I’ll explore thoughts about designing around a vDS for keeping vCenter as a VM.

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