A speed bump on the information super highway.
Category : technology, vmware
http://kb.vmware.com/kb/1022137 This video describes the process for using the Data Migration tool to upgrade VMware vCenter Server 4.1. VMware vCenter 4.1 is part of the VMware vSphere 4.1 product suite. The Data Migration tool allows you to migrate vCenter Server 4.0 configuration. The Data Migration tool is provided with your vCenter Server 4.1 installation media.
From VMwareKB‘s Youtube videos
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Category : technology, vmware
Jason Boche posted this picture to twitter of very basic steps to upgrade to vSphere
(Why does twitpic crop the picture when you embedd the picture?)
I still haven’t even started to plan my upgrade to V4. I still need to make sure my hardware will support it.
Image via Wikipedia
In the next 2 or 3 months I’ll move my ESX 3.5 servers and VCenter to the vSphere, this document looks like a good place to start to make sure I get everything setup correctly. Right now I have 5 ESX servers in the data center and 4 small ESX deployments at the edge all controlled by a local VCenter server. A big question is will I need the extra features of the enterprise plus licensing or not.
Introduction
This book linked to this resource document provides tips that help administrators maximize the performance of VMware vSphere 4.0. Sections cover hardware selection, ESX and virtual machines, guest operating systems, and virtual infrastructure management
Intended Audience
This document is intended for system administrators who are planning a VMware vSphere 4.0 deployment and are looking to maximize its performance. The book assumes the reader is already familiar with VMware vSphere concepts and terminology.
Outline
This book, Performance Best Practices for VMware® vSphere 4.0, provides a list of performance tips that cover the most performance-critical areas of VMware® vSphere 4.0. It is not intended as a comprehensive guide for planning and configuring your deployments.
Chapter 1, “Hardware for Use with VMware vSphere,” on page 11, provides guidance on selecting hardware for use with vSphere.
Image by sunsurfr via Flickr
I was reading through my rss feeds this weekend and came across a post entitled ‘The best thing I’ve found all year….’ by one of the top vm bloggers. So I had to check it out. He was posting about a Dell tool that allows you to extend the file system of a running vm similar to diskpart, but…….YOU CAN DO IT TO THE SYSTEM DRIVE!!
Download it from http://ftp.us.dell.com/app/ExtPart.exe
Eric Sloof even created a little demo to show you how easy it is!! http://www.ntpro.nl/blog/archives/1022-Pump-Up-the-Volume.html
Enjoy and let me know how well this works for you. I know I’ll be testing it this week. From the comments on Mike Laverick’s site it works on windows 2003. I’ll have to test it on windows 2000 (yes, I still have a few of those around)
later,jb
We ended up going with a small vmware view deployment because we already had ESX and got a better deal on view. But the project was rushed and its not installed or configured optimally (not the project leads fault)
We are not using shared clones and not redirecting profiles or user data.
I’ve been reading comparisons of xendesktop vs view and really wish we would have gone with xendesktop. We have Citrix PS 4. Oh well.
I found this video comparing streaming video and PowerPoint in both products. I’m just wondering how well this would look on a non-HDX xendesktop
Image via Wikipedia
We are digging into the whole VDI options because of some specialty apps one of our business are deploying. We are also consolidating our data centers so offering VDI in the datacenter will make access to the data more secure and quicker.
We’ve had people in to talk about both products. We already using ESX for our server virtualization and have a Citrix presentation server 4.0 farm (with current support)
Citrix seems to have more options and a better overall package, but there’s also a higher price for those options. One thing we were told today is even if we plan on using XP for the virtual desktops we have to purchase a special “virtual license”. I don’t remember the name of the license (it included the the word vista in it) but we where told we’d still need it for XP desktops. That’s an extra cost we were not expecting.
Anyone have experience with Epicor Clientele in a VDI or XenApp environment?
later,jb
Category : Post from around the Net, microsoft, technology, vmware, work
The post lays out each stop and explains the results. Unfortunately I don’t think we’ll be moving to exchange 2007 in 09 
the CAL cost is just too much for next years budget. But we do plan on consolidating our 4 exchange 2003 servers within North American to a single exchange 2003 cluster. I’ve start looking into running a 1300 user exchange 2003 server on ESX. Most of the numbers and proof of concepts running exchange on ESX is for Exchange 2007. We’ll see how it goes.
VMware has qualified its industry-leading VMware ESX hypervisor under the Microsoft Server Virtualization Validation Program (SVVP)…http://tinyurl.com/6l6cwh
Now you can run any Microsoft enterprise application on vmware ESX and get support from both vmware and Microsoft!!
I’m not quite sure what level of support you need from either company. Its it only for companies with EA or does it cover the single instance support calls for MS.
Please this talks about Plymouth University running 50,000 mailboxes on Exchange in a vmware environment. I want to do this for our new consolidated exchange server for North America.
later,jb
>I was pulling my hair out today, wondering why the bios screen was going by SO much faster since I upgraded to 3.5, even when I connected directly to the ESX box. Turns out that by default the bios screen is set for 0 milliseconds on a new machine. But you can chance this this is via the VM options in the VI client GUI. Remember the time is in milliseconds, plus there is a checkbox to force it to the bios setup on next boot!
Thanks for the heads up vinternals: VM boot screen timeout
I just got all six of my ESX servers up to 3.5 and VCenter updated to 2.5. Now I’m looking for good plugin’s and this one seems to fit the bill.
SVMotion is a VI 2.5 client plugin (the FIRST released, third-party plugin in fact) that extends the client’s functionality by providing an integrated, graphical tool that can be used to invoke storage VMotion (SVMotion) operations. This plugin is not supported by VMware. In fact, the plugin is not anywhere close to supported by VMware because it is the result of a two-week dive into the inner-workings of the VI client libraries with popular reflection tools (reverse-engineering). l o s t c r e a t i o n s is working on a white paper that describes how to build VI plugins.
Introducing the VI 2.5 Client Plugin – SVMotion
esloof@ntpro.nl (Eric Sloof)
Wed, 13 Feb 2008 19:06:56 GMT
Here’s links for more information and the download site.
