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Category Archives: applications

VMworld 2016 US & Europe Blogger Passes

Each year we provide blogger passes to both the VMworld US and the VMworld Europe conferences. The program is simple: if you are a blogger or have a publication then you should apply for a complementary blogger pass to one of the conferences. We provide the pass, you provide the transportation and hotel accommodations. The blogger passes are full conference passes so you will still be able to register for sessions just the same as a regular conference pass difference is these are free of charge.

Since passes are limited, we will only provide one pass per person per year. Meaning you can go to either VMworld US in Las Vegas or VMworld Europe in Barcelona. Keep in mind that in the past we have always had more passes to Las Vegas then Barcelona and both are limited. U.S. Limit is 50 blogger passes while the Europe conference is limited to 35 blogger passes.

The deadline this year for VMworld US is May 6th at Midnight PST. Deadline for VMworld Europe is June 17th at Midnight PST, which is only a couple of weeks away so hurry and get the application in. If you want to attend VMworld with a blogger pass, please fill out the form right away so we can allocate passes. The email will drop on May 25th to the bloggers who will receive passes for the Las Vegas show.

Not everyone will be chosen for a blogger pass since the passes are limited and I’m sure we will see a tremendous response this year. If plans change please email cromero at vmware.com with the cancelation so we can allocate the blogger pass to another person.

This is going to be a great year once again at VMworld!

VMware Communities (VMTN) and Jive 7 Upgrade

On June 5th at 6pm PDT we will begin our VMTN upgrade from Jive 5 to Jive 7. The upgrade will take around 30 hours to complete and we expect to be completed by June 6th around 10pm PDT. During this phase, VMTN will be in read-only mode. You will not be able to post discussions or documents but you will be able to read the discussions and documents. Also during the upgrade period, VMTN account creation through my.vmware.com will be suspended since the db will be in read-only mode.

Jive 7 release notes can be found at https://community.jivesoftware.com/docs/DOC-103485

Preview of what communities.vmware.com will look like once we are complete.

Look at feel will remain the same with this release but features have changed slightly. Noting major but there have been some enhancements which I will cover below.

Feature List

Discussion & Documents:
There’s a new option when creating a discussion or document which I find pretty cool. Rather then just drafting a discussion or document you can now draft the content or just share with specific users and then decide later to post to the community. The default option is chosen which in this case is ESXi 5 since we created this in the ESXi 5 community. You can see there are a few options here to choose from including “Specific People” which will be useful when drafting documents or joint discussions.

New Groups Widget for communities:
Jive 5 introduced groups which are like communities but have the ability to be open to all users, request to join and invite only which allows silo teams or groups to work. The open groups allowed any user to come into and have a discussion. Jive created a widget that goes and finds the duplicate groups and displays the content on the related community overview page. We will start to see these come into play after we launch Jive 7.

Mobile Experience – New iOS app:
Jive has a new mobile app for iOS and Android users. While this is an upgrade and a step in the right direction it does take some tinkering and getting use to. There are a couple great use cases for the Jive mobile app and some things to avoid or watch out for. The jive mobile app is great for finding content in communities you are following. To follow a community, click the “Follow” button in any of the VMware Communities and the content will start to appear in your “All Activity” stream in the mobile app.

Jive allows users to post a discussion to a personal location where the questions can easily be lost since it’s not created in a community and not easy to find. To avoid this, when using the mobile app to create a discussion make sure to change “Visibility” from “Everyone” to a community of your choosing.

Making this change will allow the content to be created in a community where others will find your content and will not be lost in your own personal conversation space.

User Profile
The new user profile is pretty nice, Jive moved from a simple user profile to a more linkedIn style. Here is the old Jive 5 user profile (never mind my bald head!)

Now for the new profile and as you can see, there are now skills, contact info and several other new cool informations ares I can populate and share info with the community.

Be sure to check out the new Jive 7 community platform early next week as we plan on releasing Jive 7 on the night of Sunday June 6th.

VMware Communities Roundtable Podcast – Show Notes – #174 Business Critical Apps

Hosts
John Troyer
Alex Maier

Guests
Neal Mueller, VMware
Anthony Kolar, VMware

Link to Audio Recording
Business Critical Applications

Virtualization News (from the VMTN Blog)
NEW – VMware vCloud Integration Manager to Help Service Providers Accelerate the Delivery of vCloud Services
Increase – 90 service provider partners in our ecosystem, who now offer services called “VMware vCloud Powered”
SlideRocket Challenges Nonprofits To 'Make An Impact' For A Chance To Win $30,000 in Donations
One on One: Paul Maritz, VMware Chief Executive – (The Bits blog of the New York Times)
Recently published a Desktop modernization toolkit – Grab your kit today.

Show
Live Sessions – Broadcast live on livestream – Coming Soon!
Combine the best of live discussions, presenations and chat.

Share your ideas about what you want to hear on the Live Session – @jtroyer @vmwarecommunity

Business Critical Applications Blog

Virtualizing Business Critical Enterprise Applications – Resources and Insights

VMware Business Production Bundle – Maximize the benefits of virtualizing business critical applications by enabling fully automated disaster recovery, dynamic security & automated operations with one convenient bundle.

Download Exchange 2010 on VMware – Best Practices Guide

Microsoft Exchange Server Profile Analyzer (32 bit)

Microsoft Exchange Server Profile Analyzer (64 bit)

VMware Provides Virtualization Technology for SAP Global IT Infrastructure

vShield App, vCOps, Site Recovery Manager – important add-ons to Business Critical Apps

Fun Note – ESXing is now a verb!

Additional Links
Virtualization for Small and Midsize Business

VMware SMB Social Media Channels

Twitter – @VMwareSMB
Facebook – VMware SMB
VMware SMB Blog

My VMware: This is your chance to join the Beta, and have your say!

Upcoming VMUG Local Meetings

2012 VMUG User Conferences – Mark Your Calendar!

Green Mountain Power – Vermont-based utility company virtualizes Oracle applications, including databases.

VMware @ Oracle OpenWorld

Just back from VMworld, and we’re at Oracle OpenWorld this week. Here’s the schedule of presentations in our booth. Here are a few sessions that look good and give you an idea of the content, but we’re going all day, so check out the whole thing. Link: OpenWorld Speakers – VMware.

10am Tuesday
Running Oracle Databases on VMware Infrastructure: It’s Time! – by House of Brick
This
session updates the current state of virtualizing enterprise-class
Oracle environments through the experiences of an independent Systems
Integrator. E-Business Suite customers and all Oracle core technologies
customers (especially of Real Application Clusters) can come away with
down-to-earth deliverables relating to system stack scalability,
performance, support, and the virtualization effort.
(Level: Beginner/Intermediate, Category: DB Technical Deep Dive)

1pm Wednesday
EMC Partner Presentation: Virtualization for Oracle: Extension of System Infrastructure Optimization
Learn
how VMware and EMC technologies work seamlessly together to optimize
Oracle App 12 landscape, to enhance flexibility and to decouple Oracle
App from the hardware infrastructure.
(Level: Intermediate, Category: Storage, Partner)

2pm Wednesday
Virtualizing the Oracle Database with VMware ESX 3.5 and Beyond
Attend
this talk to learn about best practices for virtualizing Oracle
databases. Specifically, we outline the characteristics of typical
Oracle workloads, and give a brief primer on performance optimization
for virtualized systems. We then combine these two topics by showing
how to tune a database for virtualization, and what features of ESX can
help provide maximum value once you’ve virtualized your Oracle
database. We also highlight some of the changes coming in future
versions of VMware Infrastructure, and how they will affect database
virtualization techniques.
(Level: Beginner/Intermediate, Category: Database, Technical Deep Dive)

11am Thursday
Oracle on VMware: Manage Your Applications Dynamically to Accelerate Service Delivery and Maximize QoS
Learn
why customers are increasingly running Oracle DB, Oracle WebLogic, and
Oracle Applications on VMware. This talk covers the outstanding
performance improvements realized in the latest release of ESX that
enables more than 95% of applications to match or even exceed physical
performance. Hear also how customers are leveraging VMware Application
vServices to accelerate service delivery, scale dynamically to ensure
service levels, and protect all applications with simple availability
solutions.
(Level: Intermediate, Category: Applications, Technical Deep Dive)

Virtualizing Sharepoint – 74% power savings | Virtual Geek

Link: Virtual Geek: Virtualizing Sharepoint – How about saving 74% of your power?.

Now on to another "Tier 1 app"….
Sharepoint is another great app, and a great app to virtualize since
it’s one that often has a lot of server components (like like Exchange
2007) and people were asking about our experiences running it on
VMware. Curious? Read on….

The results:

In terms of
performance, (omitting the SQL backend – which has been virtualized in
other tests showing EXCELLENT performance), across 3 baseline tests, on
average:

Our Virtualized SharePoint server infrastructure farm out-performed the physical SharePoint farm by 4%,

But only used 26% of the electrical power (watts) required to power the physical server infrastructure – put another way, that’s a 74% power saving over physical, put yet another way, going physical means 380% more power.

1017 Watts versus 3952 Watts. 6 Power cords versus 22

Chad also points out where to get more juicy case studies (well, refererence architectures) and us with this question of the day:

"Why
would anyone deploy in physical vs. VMware (except the obvious "it’s
not a supported guest OS type" or it’s "not an x86-64 workload")."

Announcing: VMware SAP Solutions Partner Community

Joachim Rahmfeld posts on the Virtualization for SAP Solutions blog. Link: Announcing: VMware SAP Solutions Partner Community.

We have recently been very busy with SAP activities and events,
including SAP Virtualization Week in Palo Alto, SAP Sapphire Orlando,
the completed VMware Site Recovery Manager project with SAP and NetApp
at the SAP Co-Innovation Lab, and the announcement of the SAP Enterprise Virtualization Community.
We’re not done yet: SAP Sapphire Berlin happens in less than two weeks.
All will be discussed shortly when we get a few minutes to write about
them.

But first, I want to announce the VMware SAP Solutions Partner Community.
We created this growing community of VMware consulting/SI partners
specifically to address the needs of customers who want to virtualize
their SAP environments. All partners have demonstrated their SAP and
VMware expertise, and they are well-qualified to support our customers.
We will work with them to extend best practices, develop new use cases,
and build new solutions for virtualized SAP landscapes. The partners
are also encouraged to collaborate with each other. In short, it’s an
outstanding group of diverse, qualified, and enthusiastic partners and
VMware is very excited to work with them!

SAP Virtualization Week – April 7-10 in Palo Alto!

I’m not sure how many SAP admins know about our Virtualization for SAP Solutions blog yet. Today Joachim posted about this — the deadline to sign up is March 16! Link: SAP Virtualization Week – April 7-10 in the SAP Co-Innovation Lab in Palo Alto!.

If you haven’t yet, please have a look at SAP’s announcement of the SAP Virtualization Week April 7-10! …

VMware will have two sessions. The first, presented together with HP,
provides a lot of great information resulting from an ‘SAP on VMware’
workload characterization study with HP. Test scenarios cover multi
2-tier and 3-tier scenarios of ECC 6.0 on NUMA and UMA based HP X86-64
ProLiant servers with results demonstrating scalability, ESX NUMA
optimization and performance improvements from ESX 3.0.2 to ESX 3.5.
Really good stuff.

In our second presentation, we will discuss service automation provided
by VMware technologies. Very specifically, with NetApp as co-presenter,
we will talk about disaster recovery facilitated by the upcoming VMware
Site Recovery Manager, which will simplify protection against disasters
by leveraging and extending the VMware virtualization framework.

Spread the word – although I think this event looks more sysadmin-oriented, I think in general VMware has something to say to SAP application admins as well. I wonder if there is a crossover audience of people who spend time both here at VMware Communities as well as at the SAP Developer Network? (There is a bit of activity and a few virtual appliances, but looks like they’re mostly using the hosted tools.) And if there isn’t, should there be?

16,000 Exchange mailboxes on one server with VMware

At VMworld, together with IBM we announced a new capacity record for the number of Microsoft Exchange mailboxes on a single physical server. Microsoft Exchange Server doesn’t like a huge number of mailboxes on any one instance, so administrators "scale out" by racking up stacks of servers in a clustered configuration. (For the purposes of today’s discussion, we’ll ignore server roles.) Instead, our team set up 8 virtual machines, each managing 2,000 users and taking up 2 cores and 14GB of memory — all running on ESX Server 3i on a single IBM physical server.

Check out the details from Kaushik Banerjee on our VROOM! performance blog: Link: 16,000 Exchange Mailboxes, 1 Server – VMware VROOM!.

We recently finished a large Exchange 2007 capacity test on VMware
ESX Server 3.5. How large? Well, larger than anything ever done before on a
single server. And we did it from start to finish in about two weeks.

We did this test because we have felt for a while that
advances in processor and server technology were about to leave another
widely-used and important application unable to fully utilize the hardware that
vendors were offering. Microsoft has guidelines on what environment works well
with Exchange, and a system with more than eight CPUs and/or 32GB of RAM is beyond
the recommended maximums.

Gabrie van Zanten was at the VMworld session where we talked about this and fleshes out a little of the narrative. Link: VMworld Europe 2008 – AP03 – Virtualization of Microsoft Exchange Server ( the 16.000 mailboxes story).

Normally when scaling an Exchange Server, the MS recommendation is to
not go beyond 8 cores and 32GB of RAM per server. When using these
figures, a physical Exchange 2007 server can only go to a max of 8000
mailboxes. Although there are very few stories about physical machines
running this number of mailboxes, there is some reference about 6000
mailboxes per host. David and Scott decided to take it even further.
Using the VM building block they created, the managed to put 4 VMs on
this physical server without problems, latency times (key measurement
factor for the Exchange admin) remained very low. When adding VM number
6, latency went up a little but was still well below the limits. VM
number 7 showed there was trouble on the road ahead, latency doubled to
400ms and VM number 8 turned out to be the limit with 16.000 mailboxes
!!!! and 900 ms latency. Even a 900 ms latency is below the MS limits
of what is acceptable, but it was obvious that adding a ninth VM would
go over this limit of 1000ms. All VMs together were now using 140Gb
RAM, made possible by VMware transparent page sharing.

As Rich Brambley notes, tests like this, besides being pretty cool, also give great insight into how to virtualize smaller Exchange installations. Link: VM /ETC » How to run 16,000 Exchange mailboxes on ESX.

16,000 Exchange Mailboxes, 1 Server not only offers insights on how to configure Exchange 2007 VMs to
support large numbers of mailboxes, but it shows that ESX 3.5 and ESX
3i allow applications to utilize hardware resources that exceed the
vendor’s recommended maximums in a physical deployment. Although this
test was able to squeeze the Exchange 2007 implementation on a single
ESX host without degrading the user experience, the technical details
of how it was done provides administrators a blueprint to spread the
Exchange VMs across multiple ESX hosts and fully leverage ESX
Enterprise features. …

Many companies currently run large Exchange mailbox servers in a
multi-node clustered configuration, and they are reluctant to migrate
to VI. This test from VMware helps illustrate that breaking the
clusters and migrating back to multiple Exchange Server VMs has
performance and capacity advantages. Leveraging DRS and VMotion,
Exchange VMs maintain the ability to provide business continuity and
high availability when in a virtual environment with many ESX hosts in
a VMware cluster.

Scott Wilson over at CIO Weblog has some choice words for the state of application deployment today, including ones like ‘travesty’ and ‘shame,’ but I’ll just include these. Link: The CIO Weblog: Another VMware win.

While this may not seem like a terribly big deal (other than, of course, demonstrating their product’s ability to utilize hardware more efficiently), to me it speaks to the inherent limitations of Microsoft’s server system and the inefficiencies of Windows in general.

Here are a few other resources on virtualization Microsoft Exchange to get you started:

Virtualization Solutions for Exchange Server 2007. This is VMware’s portal on virtualizing your Exchange Server. New resources will be added here — worth a bookmark.
Exchange and VMware at the Dell Enterprise Technology Center wiki

Virtualizing Exchange Server 2007 on ESX 3 – Whitepaper
VMotion and HA with Exchange 2007 on ESX 3 – Whitepaper
Virtualizing Exchange 2007: The Final Frontier – Presentation
Exchange Server 2003 Performance on ESX 3 – Whitepaper

A new whitepaper with Dell and EMC that’s not quite on our website yet: Virtual Solution for Microsoft® Exchange Server 2007 Using VMware Infrastructure 3 Software, Dell PowerEdge Servers and EMC CLARiiON CX3-20 iSCSI Storage. See Chuck’s Blog for some other interesting new tech papers that got released at VMworld, including one on SQLserver.
A quick session note from Gabrie on virtualizing Exchange 2007 vs Exchange 2003:

First they made it clear that virtualizing Exchange 2007 is much easier
then virtualizing Exchange 2003. Exchange 2003 is a heavy hitter in the
storage area because of 4k disk block size, where Exchange 2007 uses 8k
blocks and write coalescing. With Exchange 2007 previous I/O challenges
have been addressed.

Finally, you may be asking yourself, "OK, John, fine, but what about support from Microsoft?" We’ll save that for another day, but for now let me reassure that Exchange gets virtualized in production every day. Link: Microsoft Exchange Virtualized by VMware Virtualization @ VIRTUALIZATION JOURNAL.

For example, Adrian Jane, Infrastructure &
Operations Manager at The University of Plymouth, who is responsible for
running approximately 50,000 Microsoft Exchange mailboxes across four virtual
machines running VMware Infrastructure 3, said, “Our entire Microsoft Exchange
deployment is virtualized on VMware Infrastructure 3, and we are extremely
pleased with the performance we’ve seen. Furthermore, VMware also provides us with
a high availability solution that has advantages over traditional clustering
options. When it comes to managing production applications, VMware is a
strategy, not just a product.”