VMware has published a new whitepaper called VMware vCenter Server Performance and Best Practices. This is a must read if you manage a vCenter 4.1 installation, or are currently planning your upgrade. The whitepaper highlights the performance improvements in the latest version, sizing guidelines, best practices and some really good real world information from several case studies. One simple, but probably often overlooked tip, is that the amount of vCenter Clients connected to your vCenter Server has an impact on it’s performance.
Over at PlanetVM Wil van Antwerpen posted The Future of VMware Server back in May 2010. Wil makes the argument that it seems like VMware is indeed abandoning VMware Server as a product, leaving us with VMware Workstation and VMware Player as the two Windows installable virtualization solutions from the company. This has caused some reactions, including my own comment, where I question the smartness of abandoning what might just be one of the best virtualization “gateway drugs” VMware has to offer.
Finally USB pass-through is possible on ESX hosts with the new vSphere 4.1 release! This feature ha been available in VMware Workstation/Fusion and Player for quite a while. The freshly added feature in vSphere 4.1 even works if you vMotion the guest from one host to another, which is in itself pretty amazing functionality! In this post, I’ll show how to setup and use the new USB pass-through feature in vSphere 4.
If you run your vCenter on SQL Server Express 2005, you are missing the ability to set up scheduled backup jobs with SQL Maintenance Plans, a feature available in the full version of SQL Server. This might not be a problem if your backup software has SQL Server agents that you use to backup your vCenter databaser, but in smaller environments or even in your lab, you might not have that kind of backup scheme available to you, so what do you do?
As you may or may not know, the new vCenter 4.1 requires that the host it runs on is 64 bit. As 4.0 and previous versions weren’t supported on 64 bit at all, this probably means that when you upgrade you will need to move your existing database to a new host. There are several ways of doing the migration, but one way is to backup your existing database, and restore it on a new host and point the new vCenter 4.
Welcome to vNinja!
Welcome to my new playground. I used to post quite a lot over at my old site, h0bbel.p0ggel.org but given it’s weird domain name and it’s long history I’ve decided to start fresh. This new site will be dedicated to all things virtualization, PowerShell, Windows Server management and possibly even some Citrix products thrown in here and there. I might even go on about APP-V, but that remains to be seen.
About
vNinja.net is the digital home of Christian Mohn and Stine Elise Larsen.
The primary focus is on IT architecture and data center technologies like virtualization and related topics, but other content also pops up from time to time.Sponsors
