Eric Sloof

Will Crittenden, a Senior Consultant over at VMware posted a nice presentation about the SRM. SRM is an end-to-end Disaster Recovery (DR) automation product. SRM automates the recovery of virtual machines that reside on array based replicated LUNs. SRM can Recover from storage array failure and Recover from complete site failure .

Announced just this week, Vizioncore is one of a limited set of partners to be included in the new VMware Alliance Affiliate Initiative. Technology Alliance Partners from a broad range of technology sectors, including storage, business continuity and disaster recovery, networking, and security, have created VMware-oriented virtualization training and tools for the sale of their products  to create complete solutions for customers. Technology Alliance Partners helping to launch this initiative include CA, Dell, EMC, McAfee, NetApp, Riverbed and Vizioncore.

"Vizioncore has a complete suite of products to enhance VMware Infrastructure for hot image backup, restore, monitoring and DR. Partners find that our joint solution expands the breadth of the VMware sale and positions the partner as the trusted advisor in their accounts"

Chris Akerberg, President and COO, Vizioncore

Next week the EMC World in Las Vegas will kick off. While you're there, you can also attend VMware and Enterprise Storage: Delivering High Performance presented by Akorri President and CEO, Tom Joyce on Tuesday, May 20 at 12:45p.m. in the Exhibit Hall Theatre #1101.  In this session he will share a set of management best practices that can ensure consistent and efficient VMware performance success in production environments including how to:

•Manage performance across VMware, servers, and storage
•Isolate VMs that are "resource hogs"
•Optimize and plan capacity

Learn more by downloading Managing Virtualized Systems.  This white paper explains how IT can defend itself against claims from the business and user communities that the virtual infrastructure is causing applications performance and end user experience issues.

VMware VirtualCenter uses a database to store metadata on the state of a VMware Infrastructure environment. Performance statistics and their associated stored procedure operations constitute the largest and the most resource�?intensive component of the VirtualCenter database. Hence the performance of your VirtualCenter database depends upon the frequency at which you collect performance statistics and the level of detail of the statistics you store. VirtualCenter 2.5 features a number of enhancements that are aimed at greatly improving the performance and scalability of the performance statistics operations in the VirtualCenter database. The purpose of this study is to present the performance results of tests we conducted to validate these performance enhancements and to provide best practices information for configuring a VirtualCenter database. The study also provides information for sizing the server you use to host the VirtualCenter database based on these performance results. Although the new features in VirtualCenter 2.5 benefit users with any of the supported databases, the examples and performance data presented in this study are specific to Microsoft SQL Server and the paper assumes that you have a working knowledge of SQL Server.

Scott just finished the last session of Partner Exchange 2008 in San Diego, CA, and wanted to post some thoughts and information from the event. There is quite a bit of information that he can’t discuss because it is under NDA, but he wanted to at least share the information he could.

Overall, the conference was pretty good. The choice of venue wasn’t the greatest in the world; having to walk back and forth constantly from one tower to the other was a bit tedious. I’m sure that it’s difficult to find the right venue for events given all the criteria involved, but I’d recommend to VMware that a slightly larger venue would be very beneficial next year.

View and post videos related to VMworld conferences or virtualization topics. From presentations and demos—to contest entries and industry humor, enjoy this new area for the VMworld community to share!



At the end of the VMworld 2007 event in San Francisco VMware launched the “what rocked my world�? video contest. The aim is to capture all the excitement and inspiration of the VMworld 2007. Since I captured some nice events and posted my video footage on YouTube, I thought let’s give it a try. I uploaded my video’s to the contest page. For a long time I was under the impression that I was going to win the fully loaded Alienware Gaming Laptop until Sean Clark and his colleagues uploaded their movie. I knew right away that it was going to be a close call because they did a great job. After some delay I finally received an email from VMware. Yippee… I have to uphold the title so here’s my VMworld 2008 Las Vegas trailer.

Get four full days of conference activities, including more than 200 breakout sessions around seven tracks and hands-on labs, led by VMware and industry professionals. VMworld officially kicks off on Monday, September 15 with an evening Welcome Reception in the Solutions Exchange. You can attend hands-on labs during the day on Monday, however all other VMworld activities start on Tuesday, September 16. Sunday September 14, registration will be open from 2:00pm - 6:00pm.

The VMware Certified Design Expert (VCDX) on VMware Infrastructure 3 is an advanced certification developed for design architects of VMware enterprise deployments. There are four core validation components to achieve VCDX.

(1) Must be certified as a VMware Certified Professional (VCP) on VMware Infrastructure 3.

(2) Pass the VMware Enterprise Administration Exam. Includes live labs and tests a higher level of skill set than the exam for VCP on VMware Infrastructure 3.

(3) Pass the VMware Design Exam. This exam focuses on actual design scenarios and contains simulations and situational questions.

(4) Submit, present and defend a successful VMware Infrastructure design and implementation plan.

The Enterprise Exam is available this month. See the blueprint here.

At VMware Partner Exchange 2008, VMware, today announced new and enhanced strategic enhancements to its world-class, award-winning channel partner programs. The enhancements build on initiatives announced in February 2008 to enhance the VMware VIP Partner Program, helping VMware's more than 13,000 partners around the world that resell VMware virtualization solutions by accelerating partners' expertise, profitability and opportunity in VMware virtualization.

VMware Converter 3.0.3 is a maintenance release of VMware Converter. It has the following enhancements:

• Contains bug fixes described in Resolved Issues and known issues described in Known Issues.
• Can convert individual volumes on a single physical disk from the source physical machine to separate and independent virtual disks across different datastores.
• Can import as well as create Virtual Appliances in Open Virtual Machine Format (OVF) version 0.9.
• Can remove all System Restore checkpoints in the target virtual machine when doing volume-based cloning.
• Provides full support for Microsoft Vista 32-bit and 64-bit operating systems.