VMTN Blog

Another week another top 5... No long introduction this time, cause I need to get going and do some "real" work. Enjoy:

• Scott Lowe - vSphere Virtual Machine Upgrade Process
  VMware vSphere introduces a new hardware version (version 7), and vSphere also introduces a new paravirtualized network driver (VMXNET3) as well as a new paravirtualized SCSI driver (PVSCSI). To take advantage of these new drivers as well as other new features, you’ll need to upgrade your virtual machines. This process I describe below works really well.
• Duncan Epping - That's why I love blogging
  As a consultant I get a lot of question on vmfs locking and I assumed, with the current understanding I had, that a larger blocksize would be beneficial in terms of performance. I’m no scientist or developer and I rely on the information I find on the internet, manuals, course material and the occasional internal mailinglists… In this case this information wasn’t correct, or better said not updated yet to the changes that vSphere introduced. Luckily for me, and you guys, one of my colleagues jumped in to give us some good insights...
• Steve Kaplan - Don’t Believe Any Numbers You Don’t Make up Yourself
  McDonald's founder Ray Kroc liked to claim, "We take the hamburger more seriously than anyone else". VMware could say the same thing about virtualization. Every page of its Web site educates viewers on different aspects of virtualization, but the term is not even mentioned on Microsoft's home page. Navigating to Microsoft's virtualization section reveals the biggest emphasis to be on price comparisons between Microsoft and VMware. Videos, white papers, blogs, case studies, analyst quotes and even Microsoft's ROI calculator tool underline the cost competition with VMware.
• Christoph Dommermuth - How to use Novell with VMware View
  Since VMware View does only support Microsoft Active Directory Service as directory service, Novell eDirectory users need another way to get their environment working with the VMware virtual desktop infrastructure. First of all you will definitely need an Active Directory to integrate the View Manager with so that the users can logon and get authenticated. To get the users from the eDirectory in sync with the Active Directory you should use the standard Novell tools.
• Eric Siebert - Select VMworld sessions released for general public
  About 2 months ago, John Troyer asked me for recommendations for 10 or so of some of the VMworld 2008 & VMworld Europe 2009 sessions to be released for free to non-attendees. It was hard picking just 10 and I ended up with about 30 of the ones I thought people would enjoy the most. Well it took a while but they just announced that they are now available for free and it’s almost the exact session list that I picked out back then. So head on over to the VMworld website and check them out, there is some great content there. You do need to have a  VMworld account to view these sessions, if you don’t already have one you can get one by registering for free.