Don't believe everything you read.
Snapshots have always been a powerful feature of VMware ESX — even in production deployments. There are tons of innovative tools and scripts out there to monitor snapshots — just check out this new one from Virtu-Al.
If you happen to want a simple, built-in way to monitor your snapshots in VMware vSphere 4, look no further than this new alarm:
Very nice addition.
In recent months, we have seen the Microsoft Virtualization team release some pretty amazing statistics about Hyper-V downloads. First, at MMS 2009 David Greshler claimed one million Hyper-V RTM downloads. More recently– and it’s really unclear why these stats differ so greatly — Jeff Woolsey has been throwing around 750,000+ as the number of downloads whenever he has a chance.
If you need a quick refresher on what they mean by downloads, please review The Milion Hypervisor March article. In a nutshell, Microsoft Virtualization decided to get creative with the metric they use to track Hyper-V adoption. Windows Server 2008 RTM shipped with a beta version of Hyper-V (interesting decision) that is automatically updated via the Windows Update patch management mechanism. Any up-to-date Windows 2008 system is essentially counted as a Hyper-V host, which is totally unrealistic and, frankly, dishonest.
That decision now leads to an unfortunate dilemma. Windows Server 2008 SP2 is now available and it includes the RTM version of Hyper-V — no longer any need to download and update Hyper-V. That means:
As new Windows Server 2008 deployments move from RTM to SP2, the Hyper-V downloads cease.
The moral of this story is clear. When selecting a metric to brag publicly about progress, make sure it’s legitimate — or the truth may bring unintended consequences.
Tags: Hyper-V
Eric Siebert is soliciting feedback from the community as he prepares to update the top 20 blogs on his VMware vLaunchPad. That means virtualization blog campaign season is here. But, unlike those multi-year federal campaigns, this one is short — just two weeks.
The candidates are out virtually knocking on doors — Duncan Epping, Eric Sloof, Rich Brambley, and several others are already campaigning for your vote.
Friends, if you have not voted yet, won’t you consider a vote for VCritical?
There are still plenty of important positions available in the VCritical cabinet — supporters will be rewarded for their loyalty. Just look at these exciting opportunities:
We face a difficult time in the virtualization industry, with unprecedented challenges ahead. That’s why VCritical needs your vote now more than ever. A vote for VCritical is a vote for change. Well, maybe not, but it sounds kind of nice.
Tags: VCritical
Everyone knows that Hyper-V is a great platform for running your Linux workloads — as long as the distribution you need just happens to be the ONE that Hyper-V supports. Yes, someday there will be two… patience, patience.
You have probably also heard over and over about Hyper-V and High Availability (HA) virtual machines. And please, don’t forget — HA is free!
Should one conclude that a supported Linux VM on Hyper-V would be fully functional in an HA configuration?
No, one should not.
Hyper-V HA is based on Microsoft’s general purpose Failover Clustering — originally designed for applications like Exchange and SQL Server. If you can say one thing about MSCS, it tries very hard to keep managed services online. Sometimes too hard. Read the rest of this entry »
Have you noticed that VMware ESX 4 now provides an option to use DHCP for a VMkernel port? Using DHCP is probably not going to be a best practice for most environments, but it sure is convenient for quick, temporary vSphere setups. Nice.
The views and opinions published on this site are my own and not approved or endorsed by my employer, VMware, Inc.
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