VMware ESX has the ability to clone templates, and this is a great feature when using iSCSI or FC datastores. When leveraging NFS datastores however, you lose thin provisioning on those NFS datastores. One way to get around this is to use a third party imaging software. Microsoft provides a free imaging package titled imageX. [...]
Filed under: ESX, Microsoft, NFS, VMware | Tagged: ESX, imageX, NFS, VMware | 1 Comment »
In this post, I’ll discuss licensing when working in a clustered Microsoft environment. I’ll pick some of the more common Microsoft Apps and detail what is required to properly license them. Windows 2003 and 2008 support eight node clusters. In a two node cluster, you can technically have them configured in an active/active configuration. However, [...]
Filed under: ESX, Exchange 2007, Microsoft, VMware, Windows | Tagged: ESX, Exchange 2007, Hyper-V, Microsoft, Sharepoint, SQL, VMware | 2 Comments »
We are beginning to go a usage audit to true-up our Microsoft licensing. For the most part, the licensing is straight forward. Use a product, get a license. Don’t use the product, don’t get a license. But where confusion creeps in is around items such as virtualization, Public web access, Clustering. In this blog I’ll [...]
Filed under: Microsoft, VMware, Windows | Tagged: ESX, Licensing, Microsoft, VMware, Windows | 1 Comment »
In the next step in virtualization evolution; VMware is introducing vLockStep. This technology is the beginning of a true active, near zero downtime clusters. David Davis reports on techtarget, that vLockStep will create a standby running image of the VM. This VM is running in step with the primary VM, any change on the primary [...]
Filed under: VMware | Tagged: esx 4, vLockStep, VMware | Leave a Comment »
When a firm is contemplating virtualization, there are many positives: server consolidation, improved DR, reduced energy consumption, reduced infrastructure costs, etc…. There are also negatives: increased risk due to single point of failure, additional complexity, server sprawl… Server sprawl has long been a part of the Windows Server realm, due to the overwhelming mindset of [...]
Filed under: Microsoft, VMware, Windows | Tagged: Sprawl, virtualization, VMware, Windows | Leave a Comment »
Our development environment consists of two dual HP Proliant DL380 G5s. Both nodes have two dual core processors and 36GB of ram each. We have DRS enabled and are running about 32 vCPUs. We started getting complaints from the application owners that their dev environments were becoming extremely sluggish. Looking at the Virtual Center server, [...]
Filed under: VMware | Tagged: ESX, VMware | Leave a Comment »
One of the features being updated in the next release of VMware ESX is storage vMotion. Storage vMotion was released in ESX 3.5 and while great for administrators that leverage either iSCSI or VMFS, it was of limited use to administrators leveraging NFS datastores. One benefit of using NFS datastores is the default creation of [...]
Filed under: NFS, vmotion, VMware | Tagged: esx 4, vmotion, VMware | 1 Comment »
While doing a P2V, one of my ESX hosts started reporting as offline. The hostd daemon on the service console hung. Below are the following steps taken to restart the daemon. As soon as the mgmt-vmware is restarted, it immediately popped in virtual infrastructure successfully. The following steps did not cause any downtime of the [...]
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First, A little background of my home network; I have a two system network consisting of Dell workstation. The first runs ESXi 3.5 Update 2 and the second runs Open Solaris 2008.05. I utilize the ZFS for both the root and the data drives. I use an NFS share for my ESX datastore. Well today, [...]
Filed under: NFS, Solaris, VMware, ZFS | Tagged: NFS, Solaris, VMware, ZFS | 1 Comment »
