vSphere

October 19, 2011 | 5 comments

Side-by-side tests show that VMware vMotion is over 5 times faster than Hyper-V Live Migration. Plus, vMotion is more reliable and protects application SLAs much better than Hyper-V.

August 26, 2011 | 29 comments

Independent tests show VMware vSphere 5 outperforms Hyper-V R2 SP1 in overall performance, resource management, and scalability.

August 22, 2011 | 1 comment

VMware vSphere 5 introduces a new license report for vRAM. Unfortunately, the report does not display properly when using the Linux-based vCenter Server Virtual Appliance until a small workaround is executed.

July 12, 2011 | 76 comments

VMware vSphere 5 makes it even easier to virtualize ESXi, and can now run nested 64-bit guests.

June 16, 2011 | 5 comments

A recent article on a popular technology media outlet includes misinformed claims about Hyper-V Dynamic Memory advantages over VMware vSphere.

June 9, 2011 | 10 comments

Learn Microsoft's trick behind the claim that VMware vSphere costs as much as five times more than Hyper-V.

May 31, 2011 | 6 comments

When using the VMware vSphere Distributed Switch, ephemeral port groups offer a capability not found in the other two binding options.

May 26, 2011 | 4 comments

Network teaming provides load balancing and fault tolerance to your virtual infrastructure. VMware vSphere provides powerful, elegant solutions to meet the most demanding requirements. The Hyper-V platform continues to rely on unsupported legacy technologies.

May 24, 2011 | 6 comments

Some newcomers to virtualization don't know that VMware vSphere is the combination of VMware ESXi and vCenter Server. By launching a complete virtualization infrastructure platform, VMware can offer more advanced capabilities than the staggered Hyper-V releases from Microsoft.

April 13, 2011 | 12 comments

Latest InfoWorld comparison of all major virtualization platforms puts VMware vSphere on top!

March 11, 2011 | No comments

VMware vSphere Resource Pools are a proven means to reliably share infrastructure. Hyper-V requires administrators to manage CPU reservations and limits on an individual VM basis.

March 7, 2011 | No comments

Use Tech Support Mode on VMware ESXi to find, start, and obtain guest OS IP address information from a virtual machine -- without using the vSphere Client on Windows.

February 24, 2011 | 10 comments

A couple of VMware vSphere features can help ensure your virtual infrastructure starts up well after a significant datacenter power event.

December 20, 2010 | 13 comments

Hyper-V Dynamic Memory is coming in SP1, but workarounds may be needed to install applications.

October 27, 2010 | 5 comments

Director of Microsoft Virtualization says vSphere hybrid clouds remind him of ancient fax machines, overlooking reality of current IaaS landscape.

October 21, 2010 | 2 comments

Microsoft claims that Linux guests running on Hyper-V are fully supported -- find out what really happens when a customer tries to get help with a SLES VM.

October 19, 2010 | 17 comments

Gartner says Hyper-V not meeting expectations even in midmarket, VMware doing pretty well.

September 16, 2010 | 7 comments

VMware Operating System Specific Packages (OSPs) are an alternative to the VMware Tools bundled with vSphere. Pre-built packages are available for SLES for VMware (SLES 11 SP1) and easy to install.

September 10, 2010 | 10 comments

SLES for VMware is an enterprise-class Linux distribution suitable for any production workload and available for free to qualifying vSphere customers.

August 30, 2010 | 7 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 11, 2010 | 9 comments

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

June 15, 2010 | 20 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.

April 9, 2010 | 32 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 | 19 comments

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

February 26, 2010 | 19 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 13, 2010 | 36 comments

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

January 6, 2010 | 5 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 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.

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.

October 6, 2009 | 10 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 | 15 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 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 [...]

September 22, 2009 | 10 comments

By using an unsupported VM configuration file (vmx) option called cpuid.coresPerSocket, it is possible to present multi-core virtual CPUs to VMware ESX virtual machines.

August 26, 2009 | 1 comment

Even in the face of a tough economy and "free" competing hypervisors, VMware continues to acquire customers.

August 17, 2009 | No comments

vSphere makes it easy for administrators to see which virtual machines in a cluster are using CPU and memory.

July 29, 2009 | No comments

If you have upgraded to vSphere and have an interesting story to share with VMware, you could win a new MacBook or iPod. Deadline is August 17 — check it out.

July 28, 2009 | No comments

Monday, August 31st VMware will be hosting Technology Exchange Developer Day for just $249. Get a free vSphere Standard development license and meet the engineers behind VMware software.

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 [...]

July 20, 2009 | No comments

When moving your virtual machines from VI3 to vSphere 4, remember to upgrade the VMware Tools before the virtual hardware. Fortunately, if you do try to upgrade the hardware to version 7 first, this helpful dialog will serve as a reminder: You might be interested in Scott Lowe’s comprehensive article on VM upgrades.

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 [...]

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 19, 2009 | 13 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 host. [...]

May 18, 2009 | 154 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 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 [...]