Browsing Posts published in November, 2011

Reading Time: 3 minutes Finally, after several weeks from the official announce, Veeam Backup & Replication 6 is available (from yesterday). About the new features see: What’s New in v6 http://blog.mwpreston.net/2011/11/21/veeam-v6-whats-new/ http://www.veeam.com/blog/veeam-backup-replication-v6-what-a-list-of-new-and-improved-features.html One of the biggest news of Veeam v6 is the Multi-Hypervisor support: as of version 6 Veeam will now support both VMware (of course it support vSphere 5) and Microsoft Hyper-V all from the same interface. Other interesting features are: Scalability – Veeam has completely redesigned their backup architecture in v6.  With that they have the addition of backup proxy servers which offload the backup and replication […]

Reading Time: 2 minutes The RDM disks are a feature of VMware vSphere (but was present also in Virtual Infrastructure) to make a “mapping” between a LUN (or logical disk) to a VM (is similar to a disk pass-through). This feature can be used in different cases, for example: to support disk larger than 2 TB (only in vSphere 5 with physical RDM) and to implement guest clustering with shared storage (still only with physical RDM). But there is an issue (or a feature :) ) that does not allow to add a RDM disk from the GUI for […]

Reading Time: 2 minutes With vSphere 5, the VMware HA part has been completely change on the implementation part, but the nice aspect is that it seems still the change on the user part (this is a good example on how improve in a painlessly way). In vSphere 5.0 the new HA agent is “FDM” (Fault Domain Manager) and replace the old AAM agent (from EMC Legato). But not only the agent has changed: The old Primary / Secondary node concept has been replaced by a new and more simple Master/Slave node concept A new Datastore Heartbeat function as […]

Reading Time: 2 minutes In the previous post I’ve consider the cases and scenarios of a “non supported” configurations. But what’s happen with “supported” configurations? Are they always working and always in the best way? A supported configuration means that it can work well, but in specific situations, cases, scenarios. Usually a good rule could be make a good analysis and a good virtual design before choose the single pieces. A supported configuration does not mean that also meets requirements like availability, scalability and performance. For example there are a lot of entry storage that are VMware certified, but […]

Reading Time: 2 minutes In previous posts related to vSphere 5 upgrade, I’ve talked several time about the HCL and his relevance. For a production environment, have a completed supported configuration, in each parts (hardware, software, firmware, …) IMHO is mandatory. But “not supported” not always means “not working”. There are different scenarios with an “unsupported configuration”:

Reading Time: 3 minutes In a vSphere upgrade process, there are two different approach for the host upgrade: a fresh re-install or a in-line upgrade. In the VMware site there is an interesting post about this choice. The differences between an upgraded host and a freshly installed host are:

Reading Time: 3 minutes The new major release of Citrix’s hypervisor was released on Sep, 30 2011 (XenServer 6.0 is here! ). For more info see also the Release Notes for Citrix XenServer 6.0. Architectural Changes: The Boston release is based on the open-source Xen 4.1 hypervisor.   XenServer is another commercial product to ship with the Xen 4 hypervisor.  For those of you who like to follow the open source world, Oracle VM 3 launched a few weeks ago, and is based on the Xen 4 hypervisor.  Ubuntu Server 11.10 will soon follow with support for Xen 4, and […]

Reading Time: 2 minutes Some days ago Red Hat has announced the availability of its Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) 3.0 public beta. The first beta of RHEV 3.0 was announced in August, but was not available to the general public. You needed to have an active RHEV subscription at that time. The evaluation is immediately available to anyone with a Red Hat Network account. About the new features and the improvements there is a specific page on RedHat site. Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization 3.0 includes updates such as: Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager is now a Java application […]

Reading Time: 2 minutes Some days ago, VKernel has release a post (Hyper-V 3.0: Closing the Gap With vSphere 5) that compare the new Hyper-V 3.0 with the existing vSphere 5.0. I don’t know if the post was written before of after the Quest acquisition, but it doesn’t matter: it’s a comparison of two products not homogeneous, because will be released probably next year and and one was released on August of this year. But the data can still be used to see how Microsoft is working to reduce and close the gap with VMware, at least on the […]

Reading Time: 2 minutes To close the series of post on the vSphere upgrade path to version 5 I will make a few final considerations: As written several time, check the hardware and software HCL before start the migration. The HCL may change from the beta release (where, for example, there was’t any SQL Express 2005 support) but also from one week to another (for example, some weeks the Dell PoverVault MD3x00/MD3x00i were not yet included). Actually most additional software are already compliant with vSphere, or with new version (like View 5) or with simple patch. Remember that vSphere […]

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