VMTN Blog

With vSphere going GA on Wednesday/Thursday I had a backlog of around 500 blog articles to read. Luckily I'm a fast reader and I usually filter the news related articles for this top 5 which is a huge portion of Planet V12n. This week one of my personal favorite bloggers, Scott Lowe, is finally part of the top 5... It's the first time because he has been very busy with writing a book on vSphere the last 6 months. Click here to see all the details, and don't forget to pre-order it! I promise, it will be worth it.

• Eric Gray - VMware ESX 4 can even virtualize itself
  You may be pleased to know that the GA build of ESX 4 allows installing ESX 4 as a virtual machine as well as powering on nested virtual machines — VMs running on the virtual ESX host.  The extra tweaks to make it all work are minimal, and I will show you how without even opening up a text editor.
• Steve Chambers - Virtualization Barrier series... (1, 2, 3, 4, 5)
  An old mate from my web hosting days has “CAT5″ tattooed on his arm and a head shaped like an RJ-45. Ok, the last bit was made up, but you get the point. He lives and breathes networking, and much like physicists look down upon every other branch of science (but aren’t the mathematicians king?) he has little regard for other branches of IT - especially server administrators, who he often refers to a “Gollums”.
• Scott Lowe - VMware vSphere vDS, VMkernel Ports, and Jumbo Frames
  Since I started working with VMware vSphere (now officially available as of 5/21/2009), I have been evaluating how to replicate the same sort of setup using ESX/ESXi 4.0. For the most part, the configuration of VMkernel ports to use jumbo frames on ESX/ESXi 4.0 is much the same as with previous versions of ESX and ESXi, with one significant exception: the vNetwork Distributed Switch (vDS, what I’ll call a dvSwitch). After a fair amount of testing, I’m pleased to present some instructions on how to configure VMkernel ports for jumbo frames on a dvSwitch.
• Greg A. Lato - Quick Guide to vSphere License Portal
  I’ve had a number of clients already ask me about this portal and working with the new License Keys, so I thought I would help the entire VMware community by creating this quick guide to the new portal.  Keep in mind that the change of licensing in vSphere means that the old VI3 licenses that were associated to a pair of CPUs are converted to License Keys that are associated to a single CPU.  This is the reason why you may see your license counts double.
• Jason Boche - vSphere Has Arrived
  With the vSphere NDA embargo lifted a while back for bloggers, there has already been plenty of coverage on most of the new features so I’m not going to go into each of them in great detail here. I’ll just touch on a few things that have caught my attention. There is plenty more to digest on other blogs and of course VMware’s site.