vSphere

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 13, 2010 | 35 comments

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

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 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.

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 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 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 [...]

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 begin [...]

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 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 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 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 28, 2009 | 2 comments

As tasks and events happen in vCenter Server they are logged in the VC database.  After a while these tables can become quite large. Prior to vCenter Server 4, customers wishing to prune their VC database down needed to do so manually.  VMware provides an SQL script via KB 1000125 that allows administrators to delete old [...]

April 27, 2009 | 2 comments

You already know that VMware vSphere 4 saves you energy by running your workloads more efficiently.  In addition to that, there is new aspect of vSphere that will directly save trees.  With the vSphere 4 release, VMware is adopting a “no print” initiative for the technical documentation. In the past, printed manuals have been available for [...]

April 25, 2009 | 5 comments

VMware officially launched vSphere earlier this week, and it’s great! I just took the gold vCenter Server 4.0 for a spin and rolled the camera while I was at it.  This video starts off with the installation of vCenter Server and the vSphere client, then I add an ESX 4 host and walk through the user [...]