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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.

January 19, 2010 | 4 comments

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

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.

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 15, 2009 | 5 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 | 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.

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 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 6, 2009 | 8 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 | 9 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.

September 18, 2009 | 97 comments

In Windows Server 2008 R2, Cluster Shared Volumes enable multiple hosts to access a single shared LUN. However, administrators may not manipulate or back up VM files on a CSV.

September 6, 2009 | 5 comments

VMworld 2009 was held in San Francisco, California at the Moscone center from August 31 – September 3rd.  It was a great show and you could really feel the energy from customers, partners, and VMware people alike. Maybe next year I will do some live blogging from the show, but this time I decided to assemble [...]

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 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 21, 2009 | No comments

Today VMware and the top server hardware manufacturers (Dell, Fujitsu, HP, IBM and NEC) announced full support for VMware Distributed Power Management (DPM). If you have considered using VMware DPM  in your datacenter but have hesitated due to lack of official server hardware manufacturer support statements, today’s news should provide the assurance you need to begin [...]

July 8, 2009 | 5 comments

Today VMware announced that performance gains of nearly 50 percent are achievable by dynamically balancing running virtual machines according to resource demand with VMware DRS. The VMware Performance Team has repeatedly demonstrated how vSphere is the superior platform for your production workloads.  Check out the latest article on the VROOM! blog for all the details. By running [...]

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.

April 20, 2009 | 1 comment

VirtualCenter (vCenter) database storage requirements grow rapidly as administrators increase the levels from default settings.

April 16, 2009 | 1 comment

As vCenter Server (VirtualCenter) collects performance data, it is stored in the VC database. As the data ages, it is aggregated to save storage space.

February 25, 2009 | 13 comments

vCenter on Linux is distributed as a virtual appliance; it is really easy to try out.  However, the only supported database at the moment is Oracle — this might be a stumbling block for some.  While the installation guide covers everything you need to know, here are some quick tips that may help clarify some [...]

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.  [...]

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 [...]

October 27, 2008 | 19 comments

A surprising feature of SCVMM and Hyper-V is the requirement to copy multi-gigabyte ISO image files from the library server to individual VM directories on SAN storage instead of sharing a single instance.