VMTN Blog

I wish VMware used Wordpress or any other back-end for this blog. Typepad has the nasty habit of publishing when saving instead of saving it as draft. That's why this article was released with only three instead of five articles this week. Of course that was a slip up on my behalf and here's the full list, enjoy:

• Steve Kaplan - Is VMware More Like Novell or Oracle?
  While perhaps taking some liberties with terminology, VMware’s declaration of vSphere as a cloud operating system does emphasize the importance of virtualization in enabling a shared resource-on-demand cloud model. As a data center approaches 100% virtualization, embracing cloud computing becomes easier. VMware’s vSphere delivers not only the performance required for 100% virtualization, but also the crucial storage, network, security and management components. Data center virtualization has an exceptional and easily measurable ROI.
• Massimo Re Ferre' - Disaster Recovery inside-out for Dummies (with LSI)
  In this article, I'd like to document a setup I have been working on for a few days at the LSI office in Milano (great guys and free beverage there! Thanks!). LSI is the company from which IBM OEMs the DS3000, DS4000 and DS5000 lines of storage servers. Since I am trying to get a little bit more into the storage and network subsystems I wanted to spend a few days playing with those kits. I have concentrated on today's hot topic of Disaster Recovery and particularly the integration of LSI RVM (Remote Volume Mirroring) into the VMware SRM (Site Recovery Manager). I have to admit that I am not a storage guru, nor I have looked too much into SRM, so most of the stuff you will find here might be pretty basic. 
• Justin Emmerson - Using HP RGS with VMware View 3.1
  So be aware that VMware does not support running RGS Senders in Virtual Machines. That said, HP does support it, and the plan was prior to View 3.1’s launch to have this fully supported by both parties. From what I heard, issues at the last minute caused them to push this off. As a result, if you try to create a pool using VirtualCenter VMs (i.e. an Individual Desktop with VirtualCenter VM selected, any kind of Automated Desktop Pool, or a Manual Desktop Pool with VirtualCenter VM selected) RGS does not show as an available default protocol.
• Daniel Eason - The Virtual Glue
  Ultimately large amounts of responsibility needs to be taken onboard by Internal Virtualisation teams to promote the art of the possible with VA's and to educate on what benefits they provide as apposed to current methodologies. Development tools such as the latest release in VMware Studio can also enable internal teams to build wrapped custom builds for internal applications and take away the large amount of work of deploying components in the VM. The barrier of adoption here is that there is limited amount of mileage in promoting VA's and custom packages unless business application teams and other parties involved in a typical deployment are able to share pre deployment options on there side of the story for the relevant application stack.
• Eric Sloof - VMware Data Recovery and the hidden un-removable snapshots
  The tricky part of the problem is that the snapshots are not visible through the vSphere Client, nor are they listed in apps like 'RVTools' that use the VMware CLI to gather data. They could potentially be listed in the new datastore views but I didn’t think to look there before I resolved it in my environment. I ran across them by logging into the service console and running the following command to list all the delta files on the datastores attached to the server.