Articles by Eric Gray

August 30, 2010 | 5 comments

A new feature in vSphere 4.1 allows administrators to easily perform a cold conversion (V2V) of a Hyper-V virtual machine.

August 26, 2010 | No comments

Maximum vSphere is Eric Siebert's newest book and a must-have for any vSphere administrator.

August 18, 2010 | 1 comment

Session TA8188 at VMworld 2010 will cover VMware vSphere competitive advantages over other platforms. No mention of successful multi-hypervisor strategies for your enterprise, however.

August 13, 2010 | 8 comments

PowerCLI makes it easy to automate vSphere tasks such as registering dormant VMs. It is also easy to create a hosts file for resolving guest IP addresses when DNS is not available.

August 11, 2010 | 8 comments

Roundup of recent VMware vSphere 4.1 reviews and competitive evaluation resources.

August 9, 2010 | No comments

The RHEV series on VCritical wraps up for now, as the Red Hat marketing machine tones down the misleading rhetoric on their unproven virtualization product.

July 12, 2010 | 14 comments

Microsoft announces Azure-in-a-box, seemingly in response to customers leaving the hosted Azure platform.

June 21, 2010 | 31 comments

Red Hat claims that RHEV virtual disks are stored as common files. In reality, they are obfuscated beyond recognition thanks to LVM volumes.

June 15, 2010 | 15 comments

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization does not allow administrators to diversify storage technologies in a data center -- all hosts in a data center must choose between NFS, iSCSI, or Fibre Channel.

May 7, 2010 | 15 comments

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization tries to save power by consolidating VMs onto fewer hosts. Unlike VMware DPM, hosts remain powered on -- still consuming significant datacenter energy. Only vSphere safely powers off unneeded hosts during off-peak periods.

May 3, 2010 | 12 comments

While VMware ESX exposes the latest performance-enhancing CPU instructions to virtual machines, Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization (RHEV) takes a more conservative approach -- downgrading all CPUs to masquerade as an old Pentium II.

April 14, 2010 | 43 comments

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization has an HA feature -- Red Hat advertises it as equivalent to VMware HA. Take a look at the numerous deficiencies in that product that will have you laughing all the way to the datacenter - HA [ha ha].

April 12, 2010 | 28 comments

The Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization Manager is a single point of failure and the only management interface for RHEV Hypervisors. Oh, and it only runs on a physical Windows box.

April 9, 2010 | 22 comments

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization users may opt for a full installation of Red Hat Enterprise Linux as a hypervisor host. Besides adding extra cost, RHEL KVM packages and management tools are incompatible with RHEV and must be replaced.

April 8, 2010 | 15 comments

Red Hat Enterprise Virtualization is a new competitor to VMware vSphere. After almost half a year on the market, is anyone using it?

April 1, 2010 | 10 comments

Satirical open letter to Red Hat from VMware ESX.

March 31, 2010 | 4 comments

A year ago at MMS 2009, Microsoft criticized VMware for not offering public-private cloud federation. Today, Microsoft still has nothing to show in that area.

March 12, 2010 | 48 comments

The majority of Windows crashes are caused by third-party device drivers. See how Hyper-V reliability is compromised due to its dependence on a general-purpose OS.

March 1, 2010 | 4 comments

Yo Dawg! I heard you like to virtualize, but there is no truth to the rumor that Xzibit influenced the Hyper-V design.

February 26, 2010 | 15 comments

VMware ESX 4 can virtualize itself, and by using a special undocumented configuration setting it is now possible to take snapshots of virtual VMware ESX 4 systems.

February 17, 2010 | 20 comments

Microsoft has broken through numerous technological barriers, enabling Windows/Hyper-V to directly execute Linux applications.

February 10, 2010 | 8 comments

Humorous take on a reference to small footprint hypervisor advantages -- not from VMware.

February 2, 2010 | 2 comments

Win up to $2500 in the VMware ESXi Scripting Contest!

February 1, 2010 | 15 comments

With Hyper-V R2 out the door, leaked screenshots from a post-RTM build of Windows Server 2008 R2 suggest a Dynamic Memory feature is coming in a successor.

January 21, 2010 | 26 comments

Microsoft Virtualization publishes an embarrassing guest post refuting vSphere advantages, doing more harm than good.

January 19, 2010 | 4 comments

VCritical was voted #12 in the latest vSphere-land top blog survey.

January 13, 2010 | 35 comments

Learn about Microsoft's attempt to implement memory overcommit in Hyper-V.

January 12, 2010 | 16 comments

HP Blades incorporate an SD slot that can be used to easily deploy VMware ESXi from flash. Take a look.

January 6, 2010 | 4 comments

Certain errors and warnings in the vSphere Client now provide links directly to VMware KB articles with more details on the specific issue.

January 4, 2010 | 2 comments

Review of Steve Jin's new book on the VMware VI SDK. A great development resource, and administrators may improve their overall understanding of VMware vSphere and PowerCLI scripting.

December 28, 2009 | 1 comment

The top 6 posts on VCritical by page view and by reader comments.

December 23, 2009 | 2 comments

The vSphere Client allows administrators to quickly see the IP addresses used inside a virtual machine -- eliminating the need to connect to the console and interact with the guest operating system.

December 17, 2009 | 3 comments

In an InformationWeek article, Elias Khnaser does an excellent job of articulating several of the key advantages that VMware vSphere has over Hyper-V -- memory overcommit, hypervisor footprint, maturity, and more.

December 15, 2009 | 7 comments

VMware vCenter CapacityIQ 1.0.1 is now fully integrated with VMware vSphere. The product deploys quickly as an OVF virtual appliance and the user interface is a vSphere Client plugin.

December 3, 2009 | 14 comments

While Microsoft marketing material claims Hyper-V and SCVMM can transfer large virtual machine files and templates over a SAN, the truth is that all VM transfers are done over the network. Only VMware ESX leverages high-speed storage area networking for VM migration.

November 18, 2009 | 12 comments

VMware vSphere 4 offers multiple options for expanding virtual machine storage with zero downtime, including the ability to grow a running virtual disk. Hyper-V marketing literature makes a similar claim, but is limited to simply adding another virtual disk.

November 14, 2009 | 2 comments

A new paper published by the VMware Performance Team shows that virtual disks using vStorage Thin Provisioning perform nearly as well as fully allocated thick disks.

November 10, 2009 | 19 comments

According to Microsoft's own documentation, integrating SCOM with SCVMM adds high complexity and additional cost to your virtualization environment.

November 3, 2009 | 40 comments

Microsoft stretches the truth when claiming that VMware adds an additional layer to your architecture. The fact is, Hyper-V relies on its own instance of Windows and requires more instances for running apps.

October 26, 2009 | 9 comments

Bob Kelley, a Microsoft VP, recently made the claim that only 50 percent of all workloads will be virtualized. The rest of the industry clearly disagrees.

October 23, 2009 | 21 comments

Because of the extra configuration -- and tools -- needed to deploy a complete Hyper-V R2 solution, eWeek concludes that VMware ESX/VMotion is simpler than Live Migration.

October 22, 2009 | 10 comments

After being featured at numerous events, Microsoft has finally launched Windows Server 2008 R2 for the last time. Please take a moment to acknowledge the launch -- or they may launch it again.

October 21, 2009 | 3 comments

Microsoft released Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. Thee technical version number for those products is not actually 7, it is 6.1.

October 20, 2009 | 13 comments

The VCritical blog has been online for a year and has seen exceptional month-over-month growth as readers seek the truth about enterprise virtualization.

October 15, 2009 | 5 comments

When a Hyper-V virtual machine console is connected and a live migration is initiated -- automatically with PRO Tips or manually -- the remote client disconnects. The situation must be resolved manually by the administrator, unlike VMware ESX, which seamlessly migrates remote console connections during VMotion.

October 14, 2009 | 5 comments

When an administrator is connected to an VMware ESX virtual machine remote console and that VM is migrated with VMotion to another host, the connection seamlessly migrates to the destination host. Hyper-V does not offer this capability.

October 12, 2009 | 11 comments

Hyper-V CSV LUNs have no human-friendly labels, making it difficult for administrators to easily identify volumes. Instead, cryptic GUIDs are shown when monitoring from System Center Operations Manager 2007.

October 6, 2009 | 9 comments

With VMware vSphere, ESX, and VMFS, running out of space on a datastore does not cause damage to virtual machines. It is easy to recover without even a guest OS reboot.

October 2, 2009 | 13 comments

When a datastore in your VMware vSphere environment is about to fill up, you can have vCenter automatically spring into action to prevent downtime by using Storage VMotion.

October 1, 2009 | 17 comments

VMware vSphere 4 offers thin provisioned virtual disks backed by management that enables safe use in a production environment thanks to advanced accounting of all provisioned space.