Vmware
CategoryEmbotics V-Commander and VMware vCloud Director
vCloud Director and V-Commander are both solutions that are designed to help companies move pass plain ole virtualization. With the latest release of vSphere 5.1 those licensed with vSphere Enterprise Plus have to the option for a limited time to get a free upgrade to the new vCloud Suite Standard which includes vCloud Director 5.1. Having already used V-Commander I asked myself should I start looking at vCloud Director? Both products brings the promise of self service automated provisioning of VMware vSphere virtual machines templates but is one better than the other? Here is what I have found out by some spending time with both product.
Getting started with vCloud Director 5.1 - first steps
This past weekend I decided to dive into VMware vCloud Director 5.1. Nothing fancy, just a small setup in a lab environment for testing, learning, and just getting a feel for what all the product could do for me and/or my customers. I figured this can’t be that hard with only a “vmware-vcloud-director-5.1.0-810718.bin” file download. First thing was to read the installation documentation to get a since of how deep the water was before I dove in. As I started reading the instructions I felt a bit overwhelmed at how complicated the setup was.
Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Install and Setup Pt. 4
The last part I’m going to cover in this series is how to install the Hyper-V role on server core system. This can be done a few different ways so I’ll show how to do it using powershell and how it can be done using Server Manager from a remote system.
Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Install and Setup Pt. 3
In this post we continue with setting up and managing the Hyper-V server core system. Now in order to manage the server core system remotely we need to install the Hyper-V management tools on another server that has a GUI.
Windows Server 2012 Hyper-V Install and Setup Pt. 1
So now with Microsoft Windows Server 2012 available, I figured it would be nice to do a step by step setup and install of getting Hyper-V up and running. The focus here is really to show how you would get Hyper-V setup using the manual installation method. I’ll also show how you can use powershell to configure the server core system. In the end I’ll have a system that ready to configure and run virtual machines. This is only the getting started basics so I will not be showing storage setups, clustering, etc. To keep the post short I will be splitting the process up.
VMware Hands on Lab beta will be open soon.
The public beta for VMware’s online Hands on Labs will be opening soon. If you have any interest in testing it out you should get registered now for this public beta.
What does VMware’s new license model mean for you?
If you haven’t heard by now VMware announced a new license model for VMware vSphere 5.x. Say it with me “NO vRAM”! That’s right the vRAM licensing model is gone. But it doesn’t just stop their, VMware has odiously heard the cries of it’s customers and has gone even further. In addition to there being no vRAM requirements, there are also no processor core limits as well which were seen in the vSphere 4.x licensing model.
Storage for the new age of Cloud. Thinking outside the box.
So in the VMware Community podcast this week we got to talking a post that Massimo wrote about how he sees the storage path of the future. You should and can check it out here. I understand it’s a general interpretation of something that is not yet something we can implement as he lays it out but it shows that he is thinking outside the box. I really like where his head. While I read the post it got me to thinking as well but it was too much to comment on his post so I decided to do a post as well on pretty much the same topic but with my own spin on it.
From vDR to VMware vSphere Data Protection (VDP)
VMware has made some changes on the virtual machine data protection side again transitioning from VMware Data Recovery (vDR). VMware Data Protection (VDP) is the name of this new incarnation backup product which has been built on EMC’s Avamar technology. As an Avamar customer I was pretty excited to hear that VMware was embracing it for it’s own data protection solution under the covers.
VMware could be breathing more life into Fault Tolerance (FT)
Went to a VMworld session “VMware vSphere Fault Tolerance (FT) for Multiprocessor Virtual Machines—Technical Preview and Best Practices (INF-BCO2655) which was a great session by the way. VMware release FT awhile back but it’s current version has many short comings, one of which is no support for SMP virtual machines. FT to me so far has stood for Failed Technology because there were no workloads that warranted using it for me. I’m sure there are use causes but single processor virtual machines with a single point of failure on the storage side just wasn’t something that lived up to the name.