We all have come to love many free services that we have integrated into our daily lives. Things like free email, free voice mail, free open source applications, free video streaming, social networking sites, operating systems, and many other services that make our lives better. At dailyhypervisor.com we are working on a new type of free service that can help all of you in the technical community. A free community lab. A free community lab would provide access to an environment that would grant everyone the opportunity to learn IT hands on and provide the ability for those who don’t have the means to test and learn about new technologies.
Tackling something of this scale will not be easy, but with help from the community hopefully we can make this something extraordinary. I personally will be donating some of my own lab equipment to the first generation of this lab environment. I’m currently working on building the lab for early beta testing by the end of March 2010. The first generation of this lab will consist of 3 servers running ESX4i. The servers have limited resources but each one consists of a single Quad-Core AMD Phenom 9850 processor, 8GB of Memory and access to 1TB of NFS storage. Access to the lab in the beginning will be by invite only much like other beta offerings. If you are interested in participating and leveraging this opportunity please register with dailyhypervisor.com and post a comment to this blog post stating your interest in participating. In your post please provide a brief description of how you would leverage this and also anything you would like to see available in the lab. All early beta users will be also to provide feedback on the lab and may be asked to participate as environment moderators once the lab goes GA. Much like community forums the goal is to make this community driven and supported by user moderators and the such.
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Categories: Community Lab, Free Stuff, XenServer, automation, vSphere Tags: Desktop Virtualization, ESX, vCenter, VI4, virtualization, VMware, vsphere
For over a year now, I have started off telling customers in Plan and Design engagements that they would be using ESXi unless we uncovered a compelling reason to NOT use it. The “which do I use” argument is still going strong. Our blog post “ESX vs. ESXi which is better?“ was posted in April and is still the most popular. It seems to be a struggle for many people to let go of the service console. VMware is trying to go in the direction of the thinner ESXi hypervisor. They are working to provide alternatives to using the service console.
VMware has provided a comparison of ESX vs. ESXi for version 3.5 for a while. Well, VMware posted a comparison for ESX vs. ESXi for version 4 last night. It’s a great reference.
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Last week my boss came to me and asked if I could write a script for a customer to register VM’s after being replicated from once VI environment to another. I agreed to take on the project and go for it.
Like everything I do these days I decided to use powershell to write the script. I have taken a liking to it and the fact that I can run the scripts on both ESX and ESXi hosts saves me from having to re-create scripts all the time. So I plugged away to 3am wrote the script, tested it inside out and sideways in my lab. I was confident in the scripts ability to register all vm’s form all datastores I went ahead and sent it off to the customer.
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Categories: Other, Powershell, Scriptng, VI_Toolkit, VMware Tags: Automated Deployment, Disaster Recovery, ESX, ESX 3.5, ESX4, PowerShell, Script, scripting, VI Toolkit, VMware
Have you ever needed an easy to reference way to see what the configuration maximums are for different versions of VMware ESX. I know I seem to need this all the time. I find it a huge pain to keep referring to each of the individual VMware documents to get the answers. Sometimes I also want to see what the changes are between versions and I can’t seem to memorize this information in my tiny little brain. So I went ahead and created a “Configuration Maximums Comparison Matrix” based on the VMware Configuration Maximums for each version.
You’ll notice some settings don’t have values for each version. This is because they were not published in the VMware documents. As I go through some additional documents and extract these values I will update the document to reflect. For no the document does include everything from the VMware Configuration maximums published for each of these Versions:
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Categories: ESX 4, VI4, VMware, vSphere Tags: ESX, ESX 3.5, ESX4, ESXi, vCenter, VI4, Virtual Center, virtualization, VMware, vsphere
We are writing a book. That’s right O’Reilly’s publishing has signed us to write a book about VMware virtualitation. Dave Convery, Myself(Sid Smith), and Mike Burke whom hasn’t yet posted any blogs on DailyHypervisor (hint hint Mike….. 
)will be authoring this masterpiece. I don’t want to quote a title yet because it may change a few times over the next few months but the focus of the book will be about VMware virtualization in the enterprise covering vSphere 4. Not to give too much away but our book will not just be a follow this and do this type of book. We will be focusing heavily on the following topics:
- Assessing your environment for Virtualization
- Planning for Virtualization
- Designing Virtual Infrastructure
- Implementing Virtualization in your environment
- Managing your Virtual Infrastructure
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Categories: Other, VMware, vSphere Tags: assessment, book, design, ESX, implementation, management, Oreilly, plan, virtualization, VMware, vsphere
Many of you are wonder how you will go about upgrading to VMware vSphere when it is release. Well I’m here to say don’t worry. The upgrade path from ESX 2.x & 3.x is very painless and fairly simple. A lot of you will remember all the phone you have had in the past performing upgrades and scripting installs, well VMware is quickly trying to make all of that a thing from the past with new features available in vSphere.
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Categories: Cloud Computing, ESX 4, VI4, VMware, vSphere Tags: ESX, vCenter, vCenter_Upgrade, VI4, Virtual Center, virtualization, VMware, vsphere
Here is some information about vSphere that I thought would be good to share with the world. As with everything else this is just a drop in the bucket. I’m currently working on putting together some upgrade videos and screenshots so take a look back and hopefully I will have them done by the end of the week.
Here is some interesting information about vSpehere and what it supports keep in mind these are just some notes I jotted down:
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Categories: ESX 4, VI4, VMware, vSphere Tags: ESX, ESX4, green technology, installtion, vCenter, vCenter_Upgrade, VI4, Virtual Center, virtualization, VMware, vsphere
I just set up another quick VI4 lab on my laptop for the purposes of capturing screen shots and testing some things out. I was worried because I was not able to start VMs in this lab using ESX 4 Beta 2, but everything is fine again! Here is a screen shot of a Winders 2003 VM running inside an ESX 4 RC VM which is running inside of Workstation 6.5.2 on an Ubuntu machine.
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Tuesday April 21st VMware announced they will be releasing vSphere 4 by the end of 2nd quarter. This is exciting news for many looking to take advantage of some of the new features available with this release. In this post I’m going to walk through a handful of some of these new features. There are over 100 new features in vSphere 4 and this post doesn’t come close to covering them all but I will be touching on some really exciting ones with more to come in my next few posts.
Let’s start with the new home screen. It’s a handy way to navigate all the configuration areas of vSphere.
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Categories: Cloud Computing, VMware, vSphere Tags: ESX, green technology, HA, host profiles, vCenter, VI Toolkit, Virtual Center, virtualization, VMware, vsphere
Some are speculating that next Tuesday VMware is going to announce the release of VMware vSphere which is what essentially is Virtual Infrastructure 4.0 which would include ESX 4.0. I can’t say what VMware is going to do but over the next few weeks I will be publishing information on vSphere as well as some instructional videos. For now I have some teasers for you.
Here is a screen shot of the alarms available in vSphere. A you can see they have expanded the alarm feature from what was available in VI3.
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Categories: VMware Tags: Automated Deployment, ESX, ESXi, green technology, HA, installtion, vCenter, Virtual Center, virtualization, VMware, vsphere
