VMTN Blog

For me personally this was a great week as the "vSphere Quick Start Guide" has finally officially been released via Amazon. We've already sold roughly a 1000 copies, including the preview copies, which is a great success! Besides that the long awaited VMware View 4.0 was released this week so I expect to see a lot of View related blog articles next week in the top 5 as most bloggers are exploring it this week.

Edit: This weeks Top-5 is a Top-6. Somehow Mike's excellent upgrade article slipped and it deserves to be part of this list.

• Mike Laverick - A Strange and Terrible Saga: Fear & Loathing - Upgrading from vSphere4.0 to vSphere4 U1
  Well, it’s the time already - a new update to VMware’s flagship virtualization platform - vSphere4. I probably would have not upgraded from 4.0 to 4.0 Update 1, if it hadn’t been for the almost simultaneous release of View4 and the eagerly awaited - PCoIP protocol. One of View4 pre-requisites is for vSphere4 U1. Despite this I started of with a deploy of View4 on vSphere4.0 to see how hard and fast that “pre-requisite” was. In truth I was a bit nervous (perhaps more than normal) about this Update 1 roll-out. You see I’m right in the middle of updating my SRM 1.0 book to be SRM 4.0 book. I’ve spent some weeks playing with storage (EMC Clarrion/Celerra, NetApp FSA and HP Lefthand P400 VSA), and I’m was just about to update the chapters concerning recovery plans - when a long came this update from VMware. I’m sure its been thoroughly tested - but my fear was upgrading vCenter might make my SRM 4.0 build go a little wobbly. As you will see if you keep on reading - my fears weren’t completely groundless.
• Steve Kaplan - Array-based backup advantages in a VMware virtual infrastructure
  The primary challenge faced by software backup solutions is their inability to offload impact from hosts, a capability that becomes imperative as VM consolidation ratios increase. Applications relying on host CPU cycles and disk IO to facilitate backup compete for those shared resources with the production workload. 
• Scott Lowe - Understanding NPIV and NPV
  Two technologies that seem to have come to the fore recently are NPIV (N_Port ID Virtualization) and NPV (N_Port Virtualization). Judging just by the names, you might think that these two technologies are the same thing. While they are related in some aspects and can be used in a complementary way, they are quite different. What I’d like to do in this post is help explain these two technologies, how they are different, and how they can be used. I hope to follow up in future posts with some hands-on examples of configuring these technologies on various types of equipment.
• Eric Siebert - The mechanics of VMware Go
  VMware defines an SMB as a company with fewer than 1,000 employees and recognizes that these businesses have the same challenges as larger enterprises, but more constraints with IT staffing and resources. VMware Go which was announced at VMworld 2009 and is currently in Beta. Go is considered a cloud-based application. It was developed in partnership with Shavlik Technologies (who also provided VMware its Update Manager technology) and is a tool that provides assistance with a variety of functions including implementation of ESXi, physical-to-virtual (P2V) conversions and patching of ESXi hosts.
• Jakob Fabritius - VLAN testing in ESX 3.5
  The traditional way of testing is to create a vSwitch with only one vmnic connected. Then connect a VM on that vSwitch with one of the VLANs. Configure an IP address in the address space of the VLAN and ping the gateway. Do this for all the VLANs, and then connect the next vmnic to the vSwitch and start over. The following method speeds up VLAN testing significantly (in this case from 100 to 16 test cases). It is not totally automated, but I have found it very useful nonetheless.
• Tom Finnis - Planning for vSphere: Key Considerations for a Successful Deployment
  To begin, when considering a vSphere deployment, there are two basic areas where you need to assess your requirements; virtual machine resource capacity and vSphere features such as high availability. As well as the immediate needs you also need to consider what they will be in the future too, as a small additional outlay now could save you having to spend a much bigger sum a year down the line. One of the key benefits of virtualization is that you can separate your software upgrade cycle from your hardware upgrades, so you don't have to worry about whether you should update your server OS's when you virtualize them. All the same you do need to consider what the resource requirements will be if you undertake a software upgrade cycle 18 months later, as new software almost invariably requires more resources than its predecessor.