ESX is officially gone and VMware has made the succession to ESXi complete. Still, some of us might want to log into ESXi's shell by enabling Tech Support Mode or Remote Tech Support via SSH. Now by enabling one of these two support modes, a yellow warning will appear on the host object in vCenter. If you select the Summary tab of the actual host itself, you will see a couple of messages that are immediately apparent:
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 09/15/20113 comments
The countdown concludes with the top 2 finalist features of vSphere 5. At number 1, I have Storage DRS, a fantastic new feature that load balances virtual machines across the different datastores to optimize performance.
Up until vSphere 5, DRS was a cluster function limited to load balancing compute resources (CPU and memory), and that is a great feature because as VMs start to consume a lot of physical resources on a particular ESXi host, DRS would instruct vMotion to migrate VMs to a more suitable host that can better satisfy their resource needs. In the beginning this was enough--we were just virtualizing some servers and some of us were testing and using it in development environments.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 09/08/20111 comments
The exhibit hall at last week's VMworld 2011 was the largest I have ever seen. It's amazing how large of an ecosystem VMware in particular has and virtualization in general. It seems like every vendor that had a big announcement saved it for VMworld. For this week's blog, during the show I scouted the exhibit floor looking for what I thought were the best vendors in regards to innovation and I came back with the following list (in no particular order). My Best of Show Awards" go to:
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 09/06/20116 comments
VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas can only be summarized this way: It's The Godfather of all IT conferences. With an impressive 20 thousand-plus attendees (and there may have been more, had Hurricane Irene not interfered).
The dominant subject at VMworld was vSphere 5 and the products that hover around it, from SRM to vCloud Director, vCOPs and others. By the time I got to Las Vegas, I was honestly already ready for vSphere 6. The reason for that is, I had been playing with the vSphere 5 beta for months, then started blogging about it in detail here on VirtualizationReview.com and then David Davis and I did a marathon one-month recording of the new TrainSignal VMware vSphere 5 training (shameless plug).
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 09/01/20111 comments
We'll take a break from my countdown to get to something a bit more time-sensitive: We are less than one week away from VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas! With about 20,000+ attendees expected this year, it will, without a doubt, be a fantastic show that I am looking forward to. For those attending, rumor has that VMware has bought the entire stock of Blackberry tablets, aka PlayBook--at least that was the rumor on Twitter.
This year, Rick Vanover, David Davis and I have decided to start what we hope will become a yearly tradition of recommended VMworld sessions. While we are sure all the sessions will be fantastic, there is no way for us to attend all of them. Because of the large number of sessions, it could be overwhelming for some to choose sessions to attend, so we decided to help.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 08/23/20114 comments
If you've been reading this blog long enough, you know by now that I'm a big fan of VMFS. So, it should come as no surprise that VMFS-5 landed in the No. 3 spot on this countdown.
VMFS is a purpose-built file system optimized to run virtual machines. One of the big drawbacks of VMFS-3 was its size limitation of 2TB. With the introduction of the vSphere APIs for Array Integration, it was simply a matter of time before that limitation was lifted. VAAI has several useful features, but one in particular is more relevant to our current discussion: VAAI offloads SCSI reservation from the hypervisor onto the storage array, thereby significantly enhancing the performance of the VM in general.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 08/18/20115 comments
We are getting down to the wire with our Top 10 countdown, with three features left in the spotlight. In this spot I've chosen vCloud Director 1.5. While this is not necessarily a feature of vSphere 5, it relies heavily on some of the new vSphere 5, not to mention that VMware made it part of the announcement a few weeks ago.
vCD has three features that I like a lot. First off is, of course, Linked Clones. Virtualization introduced us to fast provisioning of VMs, but it was at the expense of cloning the entire disk, resulting in the unnecessary duplication of hundreds of Windows operating systems. Linked Clones, as with VMware Workstation and VMware View, allow you to provision VMs faster by not necessarily performing a full clone, but rather what's called a "fast clone." This means you still have reliance on the master image, but you commit your changes to a difference file. This saves significantly on storage costs, de-duplication software and more. Something tells me that in the next update of vSphere 5, maybe update 1, we will see Linked Clones in vSphere as well, as vSphere seems to be the only tool that lacks this Linked Clones functionality.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 08/16/20118 comments
Citrix takes another full swing at VMware with the acquisition of RingCube, just a few months after the acquisition of Kaviza. Citrix is sending a strong message that when it comes to desktop virtualization, they are not settling for 1st place, they want to make sure that the closets competitor to XenDesktop is in 5th place.
Now, I had predicted that VMware would make a move and acquire Unidesk to significantly reinforce VMware View, but that has not happened nor has there been any indication VMware is even interested in a desktop virtualization acquisition. Nonetheless, I still think Unidesk is a desperately needed addition to View.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 08/12/20113 comments
The countdown to the number 1 VMware vSphere 5 feature continues, and this time we look at Swap to SSD and VAAI, which are tied in the number 5 slot.
The Swap to SSD feature is of particular interest to me because of its overcommitment potential, especially as it relates to desktop virtualization. This cool new feature allows the VMkernel to automatically detect and tag any SSD storage that the ESXi host has access to, whether it is local storage or network storage. Once detected and tagged, the VMkernel will then instruct the scheduler to take advantage of this storage by allowing the ESXi swap to extend to it.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 08/09/20110 comments
It is not often that a technology company truly listens to its customers and openly corrects its position. Usually, changes are made months and years later and the change is introduced in a subtle and stealthy way.
VMware today bravely changed the licensing and corrected it. I'm ecstatic at the change, but I'm even more excited to hear that there's a culture at VMware that takes its customers seriously, one that is saying "we listen, we understand and we are the customer's champion."
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 08/03/20115 comments
Six is a party and at number six are three features I put at a tie: ESXi Firewall, vSphere Web Client and Storage vMotion.
Let's start with Storage vMotion. Up until VMware vSphere 5 you were unable to use Storage vMotion if the VM had a snapshot attached to it. With vSphere 5, that limitation will be lifted thereby allowing a storage vMotion operation to successfully complete . This makes a lot of sense as an enhancement in vSphere 5. Without it, vSphere 5 wouldn't be able ot implement one of the most anticipated features: Storage DRS.
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 08/02/20110 comments
The countdown to the number 1 feature of vSphere 5 continues. The number 7 spot goes to vSphere's virtual machine capabilities. vSphere 5 is a platform upgrade and naturally there will be feature enhancements to its VM capabilities. After all, this entire environment is built to host VMs. So what's new? Plenty, take a look:
VM Hardware version 8 unlocks the capabilities of VMs running on the vSphere 5 platform. Upgrading your existing VMs' virtual hardware gives you access to the following capabilities:
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Posted by Elias Khnaser on 07/28/20113 comments