ESX

March 12, 2010 | 40 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 | 13 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.

January 21, 2010 | 25 comments

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

January 13, 2010 | 35 comments

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

January 12, 2010 | 11 comments

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

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 | 11 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 3, 2009 | 38 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 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.

September 29, 2009 | 2 comments

This article is part of a series on Incoming Google Traffic (IGT). It is very clear that the VMware community loves the ability to run virtual instances of VMware ESX 4 — this has been the most popular VCritical article ever.  Take a look at these keywords that account for hundreds of searches over the past [...]

August 28, 2009 | 15 comments

While completely unsupported, it is possible to build a small 64MB flash drive that will boot and run VMware ESXi 4.

August 27, 2009 | 20 comments

Although VMware ESXi 4 requires a 1GB flash device to install, the core hypervisor functionality is fully contained in less than 60MB. Most of the remaining space is for a downloadable vSphere Client or simply unused.

August 19, 2009 | 9 comments

If your server OEM supports it, you might be able to get the free Hyper-V Server R2 to boot from a flash drive someday. VMware ESXi supports this feature today.

August 13, 2009 | 13 comments

VMware ESXi runs great from a USB flash drive and it is easy to prepare a batch of drives for your servers without leaving the comfort of your desk -- by creating them with VMware Workstation.

July 24, 2009 | 5 comments

If you have used VMware VI3 and vSphere 4, one thing you probably noticed right away is the difference in licensing.  To much applause, vSphere no longer uses a FLEXlm license server. While you transition from VI3 to vSphere you will still need to keep the license server around, though.  Fortunately vCenter Server 4 is fully [...]

June 25, 2009 | 2 comments

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 [...]

June 11, 2009 | 1 comment

VMware ESX 4 allows users to select DHCP to automatically obtain an IP address for VMkernel ports -- used for VMotion, iSCSI, and NFS storage.

May 28, 2009 | 6 comments

The number of virtual CPUs in a VM on ESX 4 is not limited to power-of-two values--any integer value from 1-8 is permitted.

May 20, 2009 | 3 comments

Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt — FUD.  The expression may have started with the mainframe generation, but these days most technology pros associate the term with Microsoft tactics.  That’s why I find it more than a little humorous to see the Microsoft Virtualization Team using it on their blog right now in an attempt to defend Hyper-V’s [...]

May 19, 2009 | 10 comments

In yesterday’s post I showed how VMware ESX 4 can be run as a guest OS inside a virtual machine on ESX 4. As a follow-up, here is an interesting feat that can be performed with such a configuration: migrate a running VM with VMotion from the physical ESX host to the virtual ESX [...]

May 18, 2009 | 73 comments

VMware ESX 4 can run multiple virtual instances of ESX 4 on a single physical server and even allows powering on and VMotion of nested VMs inside virtual ESX (vESX). Perfect for a small VMware vSphere test lab!

May 13, 2009 | 6 comments

Hyper-V is often downloaded to Windows Server systems that will never be used to run virtual machines. Making this an irrelevant metric for Hyper-V installed base figures.

May 8, 2009 | 5 comments

I need to quickly download an ISO image to my new VMware ESX 4 box and discovered that the cURL utility is now included — pretty handy. If you have not used cURL, it is similar to wget.  However, with no parameters cURL will spew the download to standard out — definitely not what you want [...]

April 9, 2009 | 4 comments

The SVVP identifies VMware ESX releases that are supported by Microsoft. Customers are sometimes turned away unnecessarily due to lack of awareness.

April 6, 2009 | 9 comments

Recently, Microsoft published a questionable video dispelling numerous VMware myths.  The only problem, at least for Microsoft, is that they really didn’t do a very convincing job.  In fact, the video is so sorry that I don’t mind promoting it here on VCritical — check it out! Mythbusters Busted Gabe’s Virtual World has an excellent rebuttal of [...]

March 12, 2009 | 1 comment

Question When is it okay to disregard the EULA clause on publishing hypervisor performance benchmarks? Answer Never.

March 10, 2009 | 7 comments

Yesterday I wrote a summary of the hazards of using SCVMM to manage VI3 — highlighting previously published VCritical articles as well as linking to a new series of videos on Why Choose VMware.  Looks like VMware may have hit a nerve, as the Microsoft virtualization team scrambled to issue a barrage of rebuttals. My work [...]

March 9, 2009 | 6 comments

Features found in VMware ESX are unnecessarily neutered when attempting to manage by using System Center Virtual Machine Manager 2008.

February 19, 2009 | 3 comments

Hyper-V Linux guests (SUSE) do not yet have integration components or customization capabilities. Nor can you P2V a Linux system to Hyper-V.

February 17, 2009 | 4 comments

Encapsulation is one of the four key benefits of VMware virtual machines.  On the surface it may seem like this is a common feature across all virtualization platforms — but it’s not. If you are a VMware ESX administrator, you know that a VMware virtual machine consists of several files,  normally contained in a single directory.  [...]

February 6, 2009 | 10 comments

Unlike Hyper-V, VMware ESX ships with complete network interface (NIC) teaming capabilities, a critical feature for hypervisors.

February 4, 2009 | No comments

VMware recently announced the new VMware ESXi Management Kit.  If you have up to three free ESXi servers deployed and would like to manage them with vCenter Server, this is a great opportunity.  Available until April 30 for $995. The kit includes: VMware vCenter Server Foundation vCenter Agents for 3 ESXi hosts (2 CPU sockets each host) 1 year [...]

January 14, 2009 | 2 comments

Even though the VI Client does not offer creation of VMs with thin-provisioned disks, they may exist. Use a PowerShell script to identify them.

January 9, 2009 | 2 comments

By design, System Center Virtual Machine Manager copies ISO CD/DVD images to managed hosts instead of sharing. For VMware ESX it uses SFTP. For ESXi, it fails.

January 8, 2009 | 4 comments

I came across this forum post today where a person is trying to evaluate SCVMM and Virtual Server — all running inside an ESX VM.  Apparently, the performance is bad… Doh! At least someone responded with this helpful analogy: It’s like buying a walk-in refrigerator and then putting a smaller one inside of it.

December 23, 2008 | 1 comment

Users that wish to implement Hyper-V CPU reservations and limits are forced to open another tool, Hyper-V Manager, instead of configure these with SCVMM.

December 19, 2008 | 1 comment

Virtual machine snapshots are a quick way to recover from unexpected incompatibilities you may encounter when patching guest operating systems.  In fact, VMware Update Manager even provides an option to automatically snapshot a VM before applying updates and then delete the snapshot after a specified amount of time. Even if you are not using VMware Update [...]

December 18, 2008 | 1 comment

Although the Hyper-V Manager and SCVMM allow removing snapshots from running VMs, they are not actually merged until the VM is powered off.

December 15, 2008 | 5 comments

VMware ESX virtual machine networking is pretty straightforward.  A virtual switch (vSwitch) is created on each host by default and is associated with one or more physical NICs.  When multiple physical NICs are used, virtual machines benefit from added redundancy and load balancing by simply connecting to such a vSwitch. However, VMs don’t connect directly to [...]

December 11, 2008 | No comments

Yesterday Chad Sakac wrote a nice article on Storage VMotion that you might want to check out. I think the Q&A format makes it easy to read. It is an amazing thing to see an entire running VM move from one storage array to another.  Hmm, makes you wonder what the smart guys in VMware R&D [...]

December 5, 2008 | No comments

When managing a virtual environment, there are two layers of patching that need to be considered.  Guest operating systems and applications inside the virtual machines need regular updates — patch Tuesday for Windows.  And the hypervisor platforms themselves, like any other software, also need to be patched. What happens to the virtual machines when the hypervisor [...]

November 20, 2008 | No comments

Duncan at Yellow Bricks has a handy post on cleaning up your VI Client cached server address list. There is a related issue with cached self-signed SSL certificate thumbprints.  When you first connect to a VirtualCenter Server or ESX host, you see a dialog box:

November 14, 2008 | 2 comments

The VI Client (vSphere Client) accepts several command-line arguments that can help administrators automate logging in to vCenter or ESX.

November 5, 2008 | 8 comments

Initially, Hyper-V Server was sort of a mystery.  Some kind of “bare metal hypervisor” that “is not Windows” sounded peculiar.  Details were scarce.  Some thought it would be like ESXi, a small-footprint design that can be embedded in a server via flash memory.  As you know, it turned out to be nothing more than Windows [...]

October 23, 2008 | 4 comments

If you have been using VMware ESX, then you might be a little spoiled by VMFS, VMware’s clustered filesystem. I have a hunch that many of us just take it for granted: create large LUNs, add to multiple ESX servers, create your virtual machines and be done with it. And, oh, migrate the [...]

October 1, 2008 | 4 comments

Now that Microsoft has released the much-hyped Hyper-V Server, it’s a good time to take a look at the steps you would need to go through to configure iSCSI LUNs. As you can see in this video, it is incredibly complex.  ESXi, on the other hand, walks you through without a lot of fuss.  VMware is [...]

October 1, 2008 | 1 comment

I took a look at the Hyper-V installation process to see how it compares with ESXi and decided to install it on Server Core, since that has been touted by Microsoft as the preferred and recommended way of deploying Hyper-V.  Well, after significant research and learning, I was able to distill the process down to [...]