Yellow Bricks posted Leave Powered On…
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On Friday I got a question about the “Leave powered on” setting for HA. This setting is used for the Isolation Response. In other words, what does HA needs to do when a network isolation is detected. The question was pretty straight forward:”What happens when a host is isolated from the network or a host dies completely?”.
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Interesting read on a little known setting, at least to me.
Yellow Bricks posted Snapshots, the revision
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I was reading Jason Boche’s blog on snapshots yesterday and noticed a misunderstanding. I tweeted Jason about this and his blog was updated in a sec. But I thought it might be handy to actually outline the basics again especially because during the VMTN Experts Podcast there was a huge discussion on snapshots. Unfortunately I could not join the call via audio so I decided to respond here.
I thought this was a good follow up to my last post.
Jason B, talks about open snapshots:
Know thy open snapshots
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VMware snapshotting is a wonderful and powerful technology that affords IT and Developer staff great flexibility and recovery options with virtual machines (VMs) that weren’t so flexible with physical machines or flat out did not exist. With this technology comes the responsibility of using it properly and knowing its limitations. Snapshots have a shelf life that varies somewhere between the moment the snapshot was created and infinity. Boy, that was real helpful wasn’t it?
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Jason go’s into some detail of how open snaps work, and how much storage they can take, as well introduces a couple of third party tools to use with ESX.
Thanks Jason.
The Zenoss Blog has a interesting article, New Community Zenoss Tray Applet
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Zenossian Nathaniel McCallum has written a new tray applet for monitoring Zenoss installations remotely. It sits in your desktop tray and shows the current count of events and the highest severity. From there you can view event details, acknowledge them, add notes and send them to history. It can also be used to monitor multiple Zenoss installations. It is currently only tested on Linux, but porting it to other platforms should be fairly straightforward since it’s GTK and support exists for Windows, OSX and other platforms. Eventually it should be ported to more platforms, add more features like alert sounds and whatever the community can come up with. More developers are encouraged to pitch in, this is already a very handy applet!
Thanks Nathaniel!
http://sourceforge.net/projects/zapplet/
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I can’t wait to try this out.
Tom, at http://planetvm.net/blog/ has a post titled : The Black Screen of Death!!!!!!
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I had a VM that whenever you tried to access the console or RDP into the server it just displayed a black screen as shown below
You could do a ctrl-alt-del and if you tabbed just right, and it was a big if, you could log into the server. Once logged in the server functioned correctly. Well I did the standard Google searches and checked out Microsoft’s knowledgebase but had no luck. I knew it must have something to do with the default profile as that is the one that is loaded before a user logs on.
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Check out the full post The Black Screen of Death!!!!!! ; for the fix, thanks Tom!
Tom Howarth has a new blog called PlanetVM
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Welcome to the new home of PlanetVM.
I hope you will find my ramblings on VMware, VDI and desktop and server management in a Virtualised environment interesting.
Kind Regards
Tom Howarth
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Best of luck Tom
http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com has a nice three part series titled : Hyper-V, not in my datacenter
http://www.gabesvirtualworld.com has this broken in to three parts.
Hyper-V, not in my datacenter (part 1 – Hardware)
Hyper-V, not in my datacenter (part 2: Guest OS and Memory overcommit)
Hyper-V, not in my datacenter (part 3: Motions and storage)
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When posting on my blog I try to stay as objective as I can. Although I’m a big VMware fan I try to look at other products with an open mind and not be biased, I found myself in doubt when creating a presentation in which I was comparing Hyper-V to VMware ESX. I wasn’t questioning myself whether I should or should not be objective, the problem was that I had trouble believing that the presentation I had created was an objective view of things.
Browsing through my presentation multiple times, I was convinced that what I’ve written about Hyper-V and ESX is an objective view on how things are at the moment, but still it looks like the only thing I’m doing is Windows-bashing. I decided to dedicate a blog post to it, so everyone can find out for them self if my points are valid. The big question of my presentation is: “Which is better for my datacenter, Hyper-V or ESX?”.
I’m looking at both hypervisors to see which features they have that would make them suited for running in the datacenter discounting nice features that I would rarely use. Here we go…….
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I will put down my thoughts. In part 1 he talks about hardware, and how it applies to each, I have found in my testing that there is even a larger number of unsupported devices that does work with ESXi, it all depends on if you want supported products.
In part 2, the discussion of Guest OS support comes up, and I have to agree 100% Microsoft is shooting them self’s in the foot with this one, as 90% of the data centers out there have a large mix of OS’s, all with different versions of Service packs and such.
Part 2 also talks about over commit, and wow, look at the numbers, since we are a smaller shop, I have not had much need to get into over commit yet, and we are running ESXi only.
Part 3 talks about migration, and it looks like Microsoft dropped this ball totally on this, as they don’t even offer a hot migration option, end of story for me.
Eric Siebert at Virtual Strategy Magazine has a nice write up titled Top 10 things you MUST read about virtualization and compliance
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There are numerous compliance regulations that companies must follow these days including SOX, PCI and HIPPA. Trying to meet these compliance regulations is never easy and virtualization adds even more complexity on to an already challenging task. Further complicating the task is the fact that virtualization seems to be a grey area in many compliance specifications with very little detail on how to secure your virtual hosts. The items on this list include presentations from VMworld, webcasts from security vendors and white papers that will aid you in your quest to achieve compliance in your virtual environment.
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Yet again, a must read, and on something none of us can do without understanding.
Eric Siebert at Virtual Strategy Magazine has a nice write up titled Top 10 things you must read about processors (CPUs) and virtualization
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The CPU is the heart of an ESX host server as it provides the processing muscle for all the virtual machines competing for this valuable resource. Therefore it is important to know how physical processors compare to virtual processors and how CPU scheduling occurs on an ESX host. It’s also important to understand the new processor virtualization technologies from both Intel and AMD that offer many benefits to virtualized workloads. The items on this list include documents that cover how the CPU scheduler works, when to use virtual SMP, choosing between Intel and AMD processors and white papers from Intel and AMD describing their new processor virtualization technologies.
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Lots of reading here all, it will does us all some good, my included.
After reading and posting the last blog post, I goggled Vmware Converter Best Practices, and i found that http://vmware-land.com has a article on VMware Converter Best Practices, titled Converter Best Practices
I also found a VMware World 2007 article on Vmware Converter Best Practices, ( PDF )
