What a week, it seems like I hardly get any time to catch up on Planet V12n at all these days. This week I attended the VMware Technical Services vSummit in San Francisco. In short, the vSummit is a bootcamp for VMware Consultants, System Engineers, Education and Technical Account Managers. As you can imagine our schedules were packed with sessions and labs. Of course my personal highlight of the week was becoming a VCDX but that is not what this article is about, it is about last weeks top 5 blog posts….
- Chris Wolf – Oracle Honors its New Year’s Resolution: Non-Oracle x86 Hypervisors are Now Supported
In case you haven’t seen, Oracle issued a major product support update last month – Platform Vendor Virtualization Technologies and Oracle E-Business Suite – Metalink Note 794016.1 (note that an Oracle support account is needed to view the update). The bottom line – Oracle now offers best effort support for all of its E-Business Suite applications on any x86 hypervisor. Shocked? - Eric Siebert – Pointers for using thin-provisioned disks
In vSphere you can create thin disks using the VI Client when you are creating a virtual machine, as seen in Creating a VMware vSphere guest OS: What’s new. There is also a new Storage View that allows you to see the true size of all your virtual disk files, and you can inflate a thin disk to its maximum size using the VI Client as well as convert an existing thick disk to a thin disk using Storage VMotion. These new features make using thin disks much easier, but before you start using them you should make sure you understand them in order to properly monitor them. - Robert Patton – Become friend with find
A while back I noticed a tip posted somewhere on how to use the find utility to register a bunch a virtual machines at once. It was a really helpful post and illustrated some of the potential of the the Swiss Army-like find utility. But it overlooked one of the coolest features of find, the -exec option. Using -exec, you can launch a command with find and pass each found file as a parameter to it, eliminating the need to run vmware-cmd in a for loop. - Duncan Epping – Running vSphere within Workstation will take up a lot of memory…
I couldn’t find a way of pre-adjusting the memory requirements but
there’s a way to change this behavior and to downsize the memory when
the installation has finished. Keep in mind this is, as far as I know,
not supported… it’s only to be used to run ESX within VMware
Workstation for your demo / test environment. I personally use it for
running 2 ESX servers and vCenter within VMware Workstation on my 4GB
laptop. - Steve Kaplan – Microsoft blog on Hyper-V versus VMware pricing
Finally, even when evaluating Hyper-V and vSphere on a TCO comparative basis, we still need to consider the context of the overall cost requirements for each. We estimate that Hyper-V will require twice the number of servers as vSphere to handle a similar number of virtual machines (Microsoft and VMware’s recent documents reflect this ratio today for the organizations’ internal virtualization projects). This means a requirement not only for twice as many hosts, but also more rack space, network ports, SAN ports, maintenance contracts, generator and UPS slices, etc. Additionally, Gartner says that it now costs more to power and cool a server than it costs to purchase the machine itself.
