Info from http://www.virtualization.info/:
VMware will allow 3rd party vendors to develop their virtual switches for ESX Server virtual network, and Cisco is expected to be the first company announcing such product.
This is great news, as the current vSwitches are lacking in features.
Cisco will be presenting at VMworld 2007. BTW, see you guys there!
Microsoft just released some important updates for people using Vista and suffering from (amongs others) slow file copies.
938979 Vista Performance and Reliability Pack
This update resolves a number of individual issues which may be affecting some computers running Windows Vista. These issues have been reported by customers using the Error Reporting service, product support, or other means. Installing this update will improve the performance and responsiveness for some scenarios and improves reliability of Windows Vista in a variety of scenarios.938194 Vista Compatibility and Reliability Pack
This update resolves a number of individual issues which may be affecting some computers running Windows Vista. These issues have been reported by customers using the Error Reporting service, product support, or other means. Installing this update will improve the reliability and hardware compatibility of Windows Vista in a variety of scenarios.938828 XP Explorer.exe Reliability Pack
This is a reliability update. Install this update to improve the stability of computers running Windows XP. This update prevents crashes in explorer.exe.
These packs (actually, they are hotfixes) are downloadable via http://connect.microsoft.com/ or via the source http://www.neowin.net/index.php?act=view&id=41691
Massimo Re Ferrè has written a nice overview article on hypervisor architecture:
It is my feeling that there has been a bit of confusion lately around how hypervisors are being positioned by the various vendors. I am specifically referring to the three major technologies that seem to be the most relevant strategically going forward:
- VMware ESX
- Microsoft Viridian
- Xen
VMware ESX is the VMware flagship hypervisor product: it's the basis for the Virtual Infrastructure version 3 framework.
MS Viridian is the next generation hypervisor that Microsoft is going to use in the Longhorn time frame and that is currently being developed. It's basically the successor of Microsoft Virtual Server.
Xen is an opensource hypervisor that is being integrated by a number of players which include RedHat, Suse, XenSource and Virtual Iron.
Read the article here
I entered the office and fired up my trusty VIClient to connect to our design environment, just to discover all machines were shutdown. Suddenly the phone started ringing. All production VMs were shutdown as well? What happened?
It turned out to be a massive (physical) switch failure: during the weekend, all switches were failing in cascade due to some switch intervention (oeps). Result: all NICs in all ESX hosts lost their connection. So, every ESX host had noticed it couldn't ping it's default gateway and started shutting down ("releasing") all VMs (the default HA behavior). But...there were no other ESX hosts to pick up the host failure :)
After booting the VMs, we noticed something strange: VirtualCenter was completely out of sync with what was running on the ESX hosts themselves and we couldn't VMotion/Edit Settings/.. our VMs. Some VMs appeared to be running on a host when they were not! Really strange, strange stuff.
To get your VirtualCenter back in sync (and if rebooting the VC Service doesn't help), you must restart the vpxa (VirtualCenter) agent on every ESX host by issuing the following command:
/etc/rc.d/init.d/vmware-vpxa restart
When working with VMware ESX’s snapshot technology and/or VCB for a while, you will notice that sometimes a snapshot doesn’t get committed correctly. This occurs when for instance an ESX host crashes or hangs during a VCB snapshot.
The problem here is that a redo file (or delta, snapshot file) is created, but never removed. When looking at the snapshot manager, no snapshots appear to be available. Snapshots are devastating for your datastore performance, so we must remove them as quickly as possible! In the worst case, the redo file and the vmware-x.log files will eat up all the remaining disk space on the infected datastore and a message will be displayed (AAAaaaaaaaaaahh):
You will notice a number of <originaldiskname>-00000X.vmdk and <originaldiskname>-00000X-delta.vmdk files appear when browsing the datastore. When you look at your Virtual Machine disk properties (via Edit Settings) you will notice that your disk name will have changed from <originaldisk.vmdk> to <originaldisk>-00000X.vmdk, meaning a snapshot version is being used.
You can use 2 tricks to recover from this scenario:
Massimiliano Daneri of vmts.net (well known for his backup scripts) has created a useful tool for patching your ESX: VMTSPatchmanager.
Features:
Download it here
Michel Roth over at thincomputing.net has written a nice (p)review on the new load balancing options for terminal servers in Server 2008. Read his article here
Duane Bradley has written an excellent tutorial on how to deploy & configure the free tool Threadmaster to "tame" CPU usage for specific applications on a Terminal Server or Citrix box. Read the article here
James D. Silliman has written a short but insightful article in Technet Magazine on deploying Windows Terminal Services on a Windows 2003 platform. In the article, he discusses GPO’s, security filtering, Folder redirection, installing Office using templates and admin installl, some licensing info, etc.
Definitly a good read for people new to Terminal Services. Read the article here
Yesterday, I attended the TechNet Webcast: Windows Server 2008: Server Virtualization Solution Scenario. It was quite interesting (although not as technical as I had hoped).
To summarize, Microsoft’s virtualization strategy is divided in 4 types of “virtualization”:
During the presentation, a comparison was made between VMware ESX server and Windows Server 2008 with Windows Server Virtualization. The thing to note here is that VMware uses drivers in its hypervisor model, while WSV uses no drivers in their hypervisor. Instead, they deploy drivers directly in Virtual Machine instances. I can’t wait to compare it (even with hot-add & live-migration features stripped) to ESX!
You can create a template VM and use sysprep to rename, reSID, etc. a new VM. The difference between the default approach and my approach is that in my approach you can completely configure your VM as you would like (for example, use the correct regional settings).
In our example below you will notice that the regional settings default to Belgium/Dutch. You can change this (or other settings) using the setupmgt.exe found in de DEPLOY.CAB on your windows 2003 CD-ROM.
The steps:
Microsoft has released some very interesting step-by-step guides related to (amongst others) Terminal Services:
Download them here
To be able to test the new features in WTS Windows Server 2008, Microsoft has made available test TSCALs (Terminal Services Client Access Licenses). You can request batcehs of 20 Per-user or Per-device licenses. Go to this website to request & have fun!
Patrick Rouse has written an excellent article on new TS features that will be available in Windows Server 2008.
To summarize:
Definitely check it out here
VMware has released new patches for ESX 3.0.1:
ESX-4825991 Patch | 05/15/07 | Critical Patch
ESX-5095559 Patch | 05/15/07 | Security Patch
ESX-5140477 Patch | 05/15/07 | Security Patch
ESX-6657345 Patch | 05/15/07 | General Patch
ESX-6704314 Patch | 05/15/07 | Security Patch
ESX-7281356 Patch | 05/15/07 | General Patch
ESX-7302867 Patch | 05/15/07 | Critical Patch
ESX-7408807 Patch | 05/15/07 | General Patch
ESX-7557441 Patch | 05/15/07 | General Patch
After announcing TS Easy Print, Microsoft made an even bigger announcement at BriForum Chicago: Longhorn will have Load Balancing! It goes to show, that Microsoft thinks really highly of BriForum A big compliment to Brian as far as I'm concerned! The Load Balancing capabilities will be included in Longhorn Beta 3 for the first time.
Read the article on Thincomputing here
The presentations from TSX Nice are available here
Longhorn (Terminal) Server will have its own "universal printer" functionality. It should be available (I have not checked it) in the Beta 3 Longhorn Server version (released & available for download NOW).
Microsoft calls it: Easy Print. It's based on the Microsoft XPS document standard (which is similar to PDF). The "Easy Print" feature of Longhorn server is quite comprehensive though and is more than just a universal print driver in that it:
Tnx to bink.nu for the info
As you know, the service console for ESX 3.0 is a modified version of Red Hat Enterprise Linux 3 Update 6.0. By default, a password aging & complexity policy is active. Password aging policies are set:
Normally, the root and vpxuser have no password aging by default (value is –1).
You can disable the password aging policy as follows:
