SLES for VMware and VMware Tools

Eric Gray from vCritical posted a good article in regards to the usage of SLES for VMware and installing VMware Tools.  Since the release of SLES for VMware, I would assume we might see a jump in the use of SLES throughout the virtualized SLES shops.  SLES is a pretty popular distribution to begin with and has seem to be relatively stable.  Eric states:

Virtual machines are not fully functional until VMware Tools are installed in each guest operating system.  If you are using SLES for VMware, there is an alternate approach for installing Tools, ensuring the best performance from your VM.

Jump over to vCritical and check out the article!

Sourced from: vCritical.com

Microsoft Hyper-V slithering into VMware shops

With all of the debate going on with Microsoft Hyper-V and VMware vSphere, it seems that some companies in the SMB market are starting to take on Hyper-V.  CIO Magazine posted an article regarding the SMB market and Hyper-V slithering its way into some VMware shops.

Even within enterprise data centers, where automation, high-level management and high availability often trump cost as buying criteria, free is a hard price to refuse, even for technology as complex and interconnected as virtual servers.

One of the common misconceptions regarding the cost of Hyper-V is the fact that you basically have no management tools.  Yes, Hyper-V is included with Windows Server 2008 and above, but, the management consoles, OS licenses and other things required to manage the virtual infrastructure are not free.  Once you add in the costs of the management tools then you see that the costs are up there with VMware’s.

This is a key time for 3rd Party vendors to take a dive into building management suites targeted towards the SMB market that wants to attempt taking advantage of Microsoft Hyper-V.  I would imagine that if this trend continues we would see a boom of 3rd party management suites for Hyper-V.  Now I am not trying to turn this into a debate but I personally think that people could turn to running, dependent on the need, VMware Hypervisor.  That might just make for a good follow-up article, a “free” hypervisor comparison.  Sound off in the comments section your thoughts!

Soured from:  CIO Magazine

vSMP VMs and Per CPU Licensed Applications

I have the handy vCalendar by Jason Boche sitting on my desk here at work and as I was tearing through the days of this weekend I came across one tidbit that is extremely handy to know.

August 28th talks about vSMP VMs and Applications which license per CPU.  Jason has a great tip that allows the application to see logical CPUs instead of Physical CPUs:

1. Power off the VM & Edit the VM Settings
2. Options tab
3. General (in the Advanced options section)
4. Configuration Parameters
5. Add Row
6. Enter “cpuid.coresPerSocket” in the Name column
7. Enter a value of 2 or 4 in the Value column

Figured that this would be nice to share with everyone!

Sourced from:  vCalendar by Jason Boche

Are you getting good snapshots?

I was going through my nightly reading and came across a great article at vKnowledge about application consistent quiescing.  Since there are many companies using snapshot technology to take backups of their virtual machines you might want to read this article.   The article goes into a good depth about the types of quiescing techniques used and what OS the technique is used on.

Taking snapshots of your virtual machines seems an adequate way of protecting your virtual machine and it application data. However, protecting transactional systems like SQL, Active Directory, Exchange and other systems using snapshots requires a little more attention.

Sourced from: vKnowledge.wordpress.com

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