The newly opened Backup Academy, by Veeam, aims to educate administrators, and others interested in virtual machine backup, in the required skills to maintain a proper backup strategy for your virtual infrastructure. Currently the site has 8 videos available, covering content from disaster recovery to backup integrity tools. Even if it is run by Veeam, it does not focus on Veeam specific products or services, but rather on the general ideas behind a successful backup and disaster recovery of both VMware and Hyper-V based environments.
VMware is close (still in beta) to releasing the new major release of VMware Workstation. Update 14. September 2011: VMware Workstation 8 has now officially been released. VMware Workstation 8 brings a lot of new features and enhancements to the table, and I’ve been lucky enough to play around with it in the beta program. VMware Workstation 8 System Requirements #To be able to install VMware Workstation, the host system processor needs to meet the following requirements:
VMware Labs now has fixed data centers which means that the VMworld Hands-On labs are going to be publicly available in early 20112! Hear Mornay Van Der Walt, Senior Director R&D at VMware, explain the details in this video from VMworld TV: This is great news, and I’m sure I’m not the only one who thinks this is a really good idea.
The last couple of days I’ve been in training class, taking the 6451B Planning, Deploying and Managing Microsoft System Center Configuration Manager 2007 course. One of the first things that got mentioned, was that for larger deployments you should not run System Center Configuration Manager virtually. Of course, this caught my eye as I’m a proponent for the virtualize first “movement”. It runs out that the reason for this is that Configuration Manager is somewhat poorly designed, as just about everything it receives from the clients in the network is placed in text based log files (inbox folder) before being processed and pumped into the back-end SQL DB.
Not that WSUS is expensive, after all it’s a “free” addon to the server you’re already running if you need it. Of course, running your own Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) infrastructure is preferable in just about every scenario except for some edge cases where bandwidth or latency issues might prevent you from syncing the updates from a central repository. Sadly, these edge cases enter the fray from time to time and I recently found myself in the middle of such a scenario.
To celebrate vSphere 5 GA release today, I’ve recorded a quick video of the old school CD/ISO based installation: vSphere 5 ESXi Install Video from Christian Mohn on Vimeo. Seems strangely familiar, right? Enjoy!
The up and coming release of VMware vSphere 5 comes with an upgraded versjon of the VMware vStorage VMFS volume file system. One of the problems with VMFS-3 an earlier is that the block size you define when you format the datastore, determines the maximum size of the VMDK files stored on it. This means that when planning your datastore infrastructure you must have an idea on how large your VMDK files will potentially be during the lifecycle of the datastore.
No, this is not a farewell post, but rather the opposite. It’s Dr John Troyer’s birthday! John lives and breathes his role, as Senior Social Media Strategist at VMware, and I have to say that one of the most brilliant moves VMware has done is to employ John in his current role. Lots of other corporation employ marketing people in their social media roles, VMware went the other way and put the very technically savvy Dr.
Recently at the office I was given the task to test out some SMB NAS products to use as potential candidates for some of our small branch offices all over the world. I did many tests relating from backup and replication to actually running VMs on them and pounding them with IOmeter. What I will share with you in this series of posts is my vSphere/IOmeter tests for NFS and iSCSI.
As many of you did I watched todays Cloud Infrastructure Forum and the release of vSphere 5 today. I was very excited with many of the features such as Storage Profiling, Storage DRS, VMFS 5 release, and they have blown the top off of the resource limits on VMs to create Monster VMs - just to mention a few. However, one topic I notice causing quite a stir is the new licensing that seemed to be very briefly mentioned at the end of the webinar.
About the author
Christian Mohn works as a Chief Technologist SDDC for Proact in Norway.
See his About page for more details, or find him on Twitter.
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