Eric Sloof

Last week one of my students pointed me to an interesting site. The Holy Hypervisor contains columns written in Dutch and English the content raised my eyebrows and changed my point of view.




The site is dedicated to the hypervisor. The hypervisor saves you money, and that's what makes it great! It can also make some other things easier. Along with the money saving, it makes the hypervisor one of the most pleasant things in computing. What it does you ask? It partitions a piece of hardware in more pieces of virtual hardware, so it seems like you have more hardware than you actually purchased.

Many bloggers already discovered the video on YouTube showing that Hyper-V Quick Migration breaks network connections. In other words quick migration in the beta of Microsoft's Hyper-V hypervisor leads to network connection failures in virtual machines. VMware created their own page on blib.tv showing a comparison between VMotion and Quick migration and  VMware VMotion does not break network connections. VMotion in VMware Virtual Infrastructure leaves network connections intact as virtual machines travel from one physical server to another. Sometimes a video says more than a hundred words ;-)

During the first month of GA, Veeam Backup was heavily downloaded and evaluated by their customers. The development team received a lot of useful feedback that helped them to create the new product update.

What's new in Veeam Backup 1.0.1:

1. VMware VCB 1.1 support.
2. Improved performance for backup, replication and file-level restore .
3. Light version of setup is available now.
4. Various bug fixes and improvements.

I just had a short email conversation with Chris Akerberg and he confirmed that David Bieneman has left Vizioncore. Chris has taken over David’s responsibilities and is heading Vizioncore from now on as president. I’m wondering what David’s plans are, but I think that we’ll hear from him soon. Maybe he’s creating another great invention like he did with his Ranger a few years ago.

A short quote from Quest Software: David has indicated that he is going to work independently on new product ideas.

Scott Herold over at VMguru.com is building up his lab. He is still waiting for the Dell server to arrive, but today he completed the installation of the iSCSI server.

I was able to finally build my iSCSI server a while back and wanted to highlight some of the details of this particular system. I wanted to try to do something unique with this configuration that would help to support a higher-end workload than a typical server.

TekUberGeek compared the user experience of XenDesktop to VMWare VDI over several different WAN links and latencies. The wan is simulated with Shunra VE Desktop - He started of with 1 ms of latency then work up to 150 ms. You can watch a higher res version (with notes) here. This is his first entry into the Citrix XenDesktop Video Tips contest.

VMworld is the largest annual industry conference on virtualization, attended by IT professionals and executives, technology providers, industry experts, researchers, press and analysts from around the world. VMworld 2008 in its fifth year, is expected to draw more than 12.000 attendees. Don’t miss the only industry conference dedicated to virtualization. It will take place September 16-18 in Las Vegas. Sign up to be notified when registration opens for this event. VMware will be posting the new VMworld 2008 Conference Web Site soon with information about registration, pricing, agenda, sessions, sponsors/exhibitors, hotel and travel. You can submit any conference questions you may have.

VMworld 2008
September 16-18
Venetian Hotel and Resort
Las Vegas, NV
http://www.venetian.com/

VMware is the king when it comes to virtualization. Windows PowerShell has gotten huge accolades as an extremely powerful tool for automation of IT tasks. These two technologies make a lot of sense together, and VMware is now making that happen with the release of their VI Toolkit for Windows. In "Managing VMware Infrastructure with PowerShell", you will learn how to perform everything from simple ad-hoc reporting at the command-line ("are any of my virtual machines powered off?") to complex scripts to automate a a massive deployment of hundreds of virtual machines. Simple, yet powerful; concise, yet robust; you will enjoy using this new language to solve your old problems using less code than you thought possible. If you are a system administrator responsible for managing a VMware Virtual Infrastructure (version 2.0 or above), or a standalone ESX Server (version 3.0 or above), then you need this book. Aimed at scripters of every level, the book starts off with a PowerShell primer and continues well into the internals of virtualization on the VMware platform.

More PowerShell Goodness: The SAPIEN Blog includes a complete section on Windows PowerShell news and tips, and the SAPIEN Knowledge Base has a growing list of PowerShell-related articles. You may also enjoy www.ScriptingAnswers.com, which offers discussions, training, and free resources for administrative scripting - including Windows PowerShell.

VMLive is VMware's interactive webinar series designed specifically for our partner community. There are two versions of VMLive - Tech Edition and Sales Edition. Tech Edition is intended for the System Engineer and Technical Consultant audience; the Sales Edition is intended for sales, marketing and business audience. VMLive is available exclusively to VMware partners.

John Troyer has written a great post on the VMTN Blog about the Windows VI Toolkit based on PowerShell. Besides a link to my articles he summed up everyone who is experimenting with this toolkit.

Well, once Carter spilled the beans, everybody is now waiting with bated breath for VMware to release the beta of our new curiously-named VI Toolkit (for Windows). The toolkit is powered by Windows PowerShell, a shell/scripting technology that Microsoft appears to have gotten very right indeed. The VI SDK, while extremely powerful, is not for the faint of heart. This toolkit takes that power and wraps it up in a very simple syntax which creates a compelling tool for VI admins.

In total there are 102 PowerShell cmdlets in the Beta that cover all aspects of Virtual Infrastructure management. The most important thing is that you can now easily write scripts, tailor made to your problems, that save you time and frustration, whether that means saving you 10 clicks or 100. Once you've had a chance to kick the proverbial tires, don't forget to visit the Community Page to give your feedback or to talk with other Beta testers. Last but not least, congratulations to the VI Toolkit (for Windows) team for all your hard work on this release!